Mississippi Center for Public Policy President & CEO Jon Pritchett announced today that Brett Kittredge has been named the new Director of Marketing & Communications for MCPP.

In this new position, Kittredge will oversee all media relations and marketing and communications needs for the office.

“We’re building not only a powerful policy and justice organization here, but also a media content shop where the leveraging of digital and traditional media is essential,” Jon said. “Brett has demonstrated that he has the strategic understanding and the tactical skills to allow us to communicate and market our ideas across the state and nation. We’re delighted to add another smart, dedicated conservative to our team.”

Kittredge previously served as Director of Communications for Empower Mississippi. Prior to that, he served in similar roles for the Mississippi Republican Party and the Office of the State Auditor.

“I am excited for this opportunity,” Brett said. “MCPP has a proud history of advancing the ideals of liberty and freedom in Mississippi, and I am ready to build on that legacy and take our communications platforms to the next level and spread our message of real conservative ideas with policy makers, the media, and the public.”

Kittredge received his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Mississippi and his Master’s Degree from Abilene Christian University.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff in an important First Amendment case, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky. Mississippi Justice Institute Director Shadrack White partnered with other organizations from around the country to file an amicus brief in the case in favor of the plaintiff.

“This is an important victory for freedom of speech today,” said White. “Conservatives and libertarians should be ecstatic over the recent rulings coming out of our Supreme Court. It was a privilege to be able to file an argument in this case supporting the winning side.”

The Mansky case challenged a Minnesota law that barred apparel that had ideological messages on it in polling places. MJI and other organizations argued that the Minnesota law violated the First Amendment.

“Minnesota tried to argue that this case was about protecting voters in the voting booth, but Minnesota’s law was being enforced in a way that favored some ideologies over others. For example, Minnesota admitted that they would ban shirts from a polling place that had the words ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ or the text of the Second Amendment or ‘All Lives Matter,’ but they would allow shirts with a rainbow flag or shirts that said ‘Parkland Strong.’

“That sort of inconsistent enforcement is exactly why we have the First Amendment: to protect the right of a person to speak even if the government happens to disagree with you or when someone says they’re offended by it,” said White. “You should not be punished for wearing a conservative or libertarian message. Americans should be thankful that this Court takes freedom of speech seriously.”

Click here to read the amicus brief from MJI and its sister organizations.

The Tupelo city council is considering regulating food trucks in the city but not for reasons you may suspect.

It is not because the food trucks are unclean. It is not because they are unsafe. There hasn’t been any report of a massive wave of citizens becoming ill after enjoying a meal from a local food truck.

And the food trucks aren’t operating illegally. They still go through the same health and safety regulations of a traditional restaurant.

According to a recent article in The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, city leaders are looking to regulate food trucks as part of an effort to protect brick-and-mortar restaurants within the city limits.

Picking winners and losers

The food trucks are simply competition, and apparently the city of Tupelo is interested in favoring one type of industry over another.

We all agree that there are general standards than any business that is serving food must meet. That is already being done in Tupelo. No cities, however, should be in the business of saying you must be located a certain distance from an established restaurant. Or you can only have food trucks for certain special events or weekends.

City leaders should encourage food trucks. They should be proud that food trucks want to be in their city. A look around any growing or dynamic city across the country will show an emerging food truck sector. That should be celebrated, not overregulated.

This is about more than food trucks

We should be encouraging people to become entrepreneurs. To follow their passion. This extends beyond just food trucks and touches every area of our economy.

Too often government leaders just think about what already exists or what is already providing a tax revenue. And then we feel threatened if competition rises up. As anyone who has ever been part of the private sector will tell you, competition is a good thing. Businesses grow (or fail). And consumers win.

The reason taxis have fought Uber or Lyft is not because you or I can’t drive people to where they want to go. Picking someone up at the airport and driving them to a hotel is not some proprietary work that an untrained professional cannot do. Rather, it is monopoly one sector of an industry had. They lost that monopoly because, like all monopolies, innovation, risk taking, and customer service was absent from the taxi industry.

Rather than get better or more competitive, monopolies reach out to the government to protect them. We saw this when the ridesharing economy was born and expanded. We have seen it with the homesharing economy. We see it with food trucks. And I am certain we will see it in other areas of our economy in the future.

Unfortunately, as we have witnessed in almost every case, the government mindset has been to overregulate and protect what it is already there. To choose winners and losers.

That should not be the job of government. That should be the job of the individual citizens. Because if they don’t like what food trucks in Tupelo are providing, the market will decide who the winners and losers are. We don’t go to government websites to choose which restaurant or hotel we will visit. We go to peer review sites or apps.

Encouraging entrepreneurship and letting the market decide is the answer that Tupelo’s city council should be choosing. It works in cities all across America. And it will work in Tupelo if government leaders will just let the citizens decide for themselves.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court issued perhaps its most important opinion of this term in a case called Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The ruling struck a blow for tolerance in America.

That last sentence will come as a surprise to my liberal friends.

A little background if you haven’t heard of the case: In Masterpiece, the plaintiff was Jack Phillips, an expert cake baker and devout Christian. For years Jack ran his store, Masterpiece Cakeshop, and made elaborate, beautiful cakes for weddings and other special occasions. His cakes are works of art. If you don’t believe me, visit his website, masterpiececakes.com, to see for yourself.

In 2012, two gay customers entered Jack’s store and asked Jack to design and bake a cake for their same-sex wedding. Jack said he would gladly bake a cake for the two of them for any other reason, but his religious convictions prevented him from baking a cake for a gay wedding. The couple then filed a discrimination complaint against Jack, claiming he violated a Colorado law which bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. Jack showed that he had happily served gay customers before, and that he did not refuse to serve people based on their sexual orientation, but instead simply refused to participate in a ceremony that conflicted with his faith.

The State of Colorado found Jack in violation of the statute. During the hearing on the matter, Colorado officials compared Jack’s arguments to arguments for slavery and the Holocaust. The government ruled Jack had to reverse his store’s policy, and store employees had to undergo reeducation about the harm they had allegedly caused.

Jack decided he would not be steamrolled, though. He took the matter to court, arguing that Colorado had taken away his First Amendment rights. He endured years of public criticism for standing up for himself and his store. His case eventually wound its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Jack’s favor, 7 to 2.

The Court said Colorado acted in a hostile way during Jack’s hearing. They said Colorado was inconsistent, too. Colorado allowed gay cake bakers, for instance, to deny service to customers who wanted a message on a cake that was hostile to same-sex marriage. But when it came to Jack, Colorado insisted that he make cakes for gay weddings.

The Court made the right call when it ruled in Jack’s favor. The Court prevented a world where a black wedding photographer could be forced to take photos at the wedding of a white supremacist, or a Jewish cake baker could be forced to work for an anti-Semite. Artists shouldn’t be forced to speak messages that conflict with their views.

The case has a long list of other consequences, too, and some of them are local. Mississippi passed a bill not long ago called HB 1523, which protects the religious liberty rights of Mississippians who oppose same-sex marriage. HB 1523 already led to one lawsuit, which was thrown out, and I predict it will generate more litigation. While the Court in Masterpiece did not speak directly to a statute like ours, its statement that “religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views” could help the state defend HB 1523.

The far more important consequence, though, is the signal this ruling sends to society. To be sure, Masterpiece involves an emotional issue for many. America is still a nation divided on the question of gay marriage. I have many close friends and even family who disagree with my views on the matter. Those disagreements have taken on an ugly form in the last few years. People of faith who have a particular understanding of marriage are called bigots and publicly shamed.

This volatile disagreement is just as much a product of a cultural divide as it is an ideological one. People feel that entertainers, media personalities, giant corporations (Bud Light even tells me to believe in gay marriage now), and others located in a few, elite zip codes enforce a code of beliefs, and if you violate the code on this issue, you may as well be a defender of Jim Crow. In short, people feel bulldozed over what they believe.

It can be hard to be a person of faith in such an environment. We must show others that a person can believe in traditional marriage and also believe all human beings have dignity and worth. But if you cannot convince them of that, you have to be willing to fight for your views.

For those of us willing to fight, we found help from an unexpected source this week: nine lawyers in robes in Washington, DC.

This column appeared in the Clarion Ledger on June 12, 2018. 

While everyone has a general idea of what economists mean by the term ‘capitalism’ it is important that we now define it more precisely. Fundamentally, capitalism is an economic system founded on the private ownership of the productive assets within an economy. These include land, labor (including your person), and all other tangible property (e.g., cars, houses, factories, etc.) as well as intangible property (e.g., radio waves, intellectual property, etc.). Individuals are free to make decisions regarding the use of their property, with the sole constraint that they do not infringe upon the property rights of others.

The freedom of action given to private owners under a system of capitalism is why the index that ranks states and countries is called the ‘economic freedom’ index. Economic freedom is synonymous with capitalism. More specifically, the key ingredients of economic freedom and capitalism are:

• personal choice and accountability for damages to others,
• voluntary exchange, with unregulated prices negotiated by buyers and sellers,
• freedom to become an entrepreneur and compete with existing businesses, and
• protection of persons and property from physical aggression, theft, lawsuits, or confiscation by others, including the government.

The concept of capitalism is deeply rooted in the notions of individual liberty and freedom that underlie our country’s founding and are reflected in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Economic freedoms are based in the same philosophies that support political and civil liberties (like the freedom of speech and the freedom to elect representatives). Individuals have a right to decide how they will use their assets and talents. On the other hand, they do not have a right to the time, talents, and resources of others.

Because private property rights, and their protection, are critical to economic progress, it is worthwhile to be more specific about private property rights. Private property rights entail three economic aspects: (1) control rights – the right to do with your property as you wish, even to exclude others from using it, so long as you do not use your property to infringe on the property rights of someone else; (2) cash flow rights – the right to the income earned from the property or its use (i.e. being the ‘residual claimant,’ which is also critical for enabling the property to be used as collateral for loans); and, (3) transferability rights – the right to sell or divest of your property under the terms and conditions you see fit.

A government policy that weakens any one of these components of property rights weakens property rights in general. Taxes, for example, restrict the cash flow rights associated with property and so weaken private property rights on that dimension. Regulations, on the other hand, restrict how owners may use their property, infringing on control rights, and weakening private property rights on that dimension. Outright takings, or other forms of outright expropriation, by removing the property from an owner’s possession (such as eminent domain, especially when allowing the state to remove the property from an owner’s possession and transfer it to another private owner) actually weaken property rights on all of the dimensions considered above, making property a ‘contingent right’ (contingent on the state’s arbitrary will) rather than an ‘absolute right’ guaranteed and protected by law.

In order to nurture capitalism, government must do some things but refrain from doing others. Governments promote capitalism by establishing a legal structure that provides for the even-handed enforcement of contracts and the protection of individuals and their property from aggressors seeking to use violence, coercion, and fraud to seize things that do not belong to them. However, governments must refrain from actions that weaken private property rights or interfere with personal choice, voluntary exchange, and the freedom of individuals and businesses to compete. When these government actions are substituted for personal choice, economic freedom is reduced. When government protects people and their property, enforces contracts in an unbiased manner, and provides a limited set of ‘public goods’ like roads, flood control, and other major public works projects, but leaves the rest to the private market, they support the institutions of capitalism and the resultant prosperity it creates.

This is an excerpt from The Sources of Economic Growth by Russell S. Sobel and J. Brandon Bolen. It was published in Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi.

Like individual rights, the family as an institution preceded the institution of government.  History has shown that the type of family that is most beneficial to society—and to children—is the two-parent family that begins with marriage between a man and a woman.  An indispensable component of ordered societies, the family is where children are best taught character, honor, the importance of hard work, virtue, citizenship, and respect for authority. As the fundamental building block of society, the family’s prosperity is essential to the development, advancement, and continuation of society. When families are healthy, communities are healthy; when families deteriorate, communities deteriorate.  

All levels of government should protect this foundational unit.

Welfare programs initiated in the 1960s had the unintended consequence of devaluing the contribution of a father to the family—resulting in a sharp increase in female headed single-parent households. (For more on this, see Principle #6.) Those programs still favor unmarried couples over married ones. Another example of harmful policy is the “marriage penalty” in the federal tax code, which causes married couples to pay more in federal taxes than they would if they were single. (Fortunately, Mississippi no longer has a marriage penalty in our state’s tax code; exemptions and deductions for married couples are double those for singles. Still, married couples in Mississippi are affected by the federal penalty.)

Marriage is a relationship unlike any other between humans. Far more than a mere "contractual" arrangement, marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman. Because of its unique position, and because the stability of society is so indissolubly bonded to the stability of the institution of marriage, government does have a responsibility to protect it.

When it comes to raising children, government should not substitute its judgment on what constitutes the “best interest” of a child. Parents know their children best and can best understand what their family needs.  How can a bureaucrat or politician judge better than parents?  Only in unambiguous cases of habitual abuse or neglect should government step in. In cases that are so dangerous that a child must be removed from the home, the child should not be returned unless there is clear evidence the parents have radically changed their behavior.

Perhaps the most consistent way government interferes with the decisions of parents—especially in low and middle-income families—is by taking so much of their money that both parents are forced to work, even if they believe their children would be better served by having one parent at home. Ironically, the money taken by government is justified many times as being spent "for the children."

It is imperative that the type of family to be esteemed and taught as the ideal is the one based on traditional marriage. Government officials must carefully consider the long-term impact policies will have on the family and should do nothing that undermines or harms the traditional, marriage-based, two-parent family. When government officials understand this role, they will govern with humility and restraint.

This is an excerpt from Governing By Principle, MCPP's ten principles to guide public policy. 

Memo to activist CEOs: Dust off your notes, open your textbooks, and reread the basics of corporate finance taught at every credible university. The fiduciary responsibility of a CEO is to safeguard the company’s assets and acknowledge this overriding principle: “It’s not our money but that of the shareholders.”

In today’s heated political climate, some executives have rejected the fundamentals in favor of short-term publicity for themselves and their corporations. When several CEOs quickly resigned over the past few days from the now-disbanded White House Council on Manufacturing, they cited personal views or political disagreement as their reason for leaving. Those may be truthful reasons, but are they in the best interests of the companies they represent? Wouldn’t shareholders be better off with their interests represented in this powerful group of government officials who control regulatory policy?

Some might call Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier’s decision to resign from the council brave, but his company would have gained a significant competitive advantage from retaining its seat on the council. Shareholders may have legitimate questions about the risk of Mr. Frazier’s bravery. And if high-profile CEOs have the authority to take such risks, should they bear responsibility for any long-term damage to shareholder value? We say yes.

Target Corp. shareholders have watched helplessly since last year as another case of political posturing played out in North Carolina, where we work and live. Target’s activist CEO, Brian Cornell, responded to the state’s contentious House Bill 2, also known as the bathroom law, by announcing a new “inclusive” bathroom policy in April 2016. What were the results? Plummeting sales due to a widespread boycott, an erosion of market share and, most important, a 40% drop in Target’s stock price between April 2016 and July 2017. That devastation equated to a $20 billion loss of shareholder value while the market rose 15% in that same period.

For the owners of the company—the thousands of small shareholders and the millions of Americans whose pension plans own Target stock—this performance did not affect their annual incomes, but it affected their life savings and retirement. They got sucker-punched. They should punch back.

When shareholders suffer damages at the hands of corporate management, they can pursue one of two legal remedies: class-action suits, in which multiple plaintiffs belonging to a defined “class” join a suit seeking compensation, or shareholder derivative lawsuits, in which company managers are sued on behalf of all shareholders. Take your pick, Target shareholders. Willful and controversial CEO activism shouldn’t be viewed any differently from malfeasance or bad policies. They all reek of leadership malpractice.

In the landmark 1919 case Dodge v. Ford, the Michigan Supreme Court laid out the ruling that has guided corporate America ever since. Ford Motor Co. must make decisions in the interests of its shareholders, the court ruled, rather than in a charitable manner. The case is often cited as affirming the principle of “shareholder primacy.” The ruling affirmed a wide latitude in running a company, but also noted “a corporation should have as its objective the conduct of business activities with a view to enhancing corporate profit and shareholder gain.”

Did Mr. Cornell really see a rational link between shareholder gain and Target’s inclusive bathroom policy? When Howard Schultz of Starbucks decides to take away Christmas cups or hire refugees as a challenge to President Trump, and the stock fares miserably compared with its competition, do the coffee chain’s 24,000 small shareholders have the right to sue? Again, we say yes.

Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, travels the country to attend shareholder meetings of public corporations. According to Mr. Danhof, “activism is driven by the CEOs’ belief that progressive ideas are popular among media and that good public relations follows those who espouse those views.” This might explain why 127 companies signed on to oppose Mr. Trump’s immigration executive order or why 68 companies opposed North Carolina’s HB2—even before enough information was available to understand either.

Our message to small shareholders of companies like Starbucks, Merck and Target: You can sue when a CEO decides to institute a corporate social-responsibility program that has no benefit to the business. If you want to ensure shareholder primacy is protected, keep your legal options open.

This column appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 18, 2017.

New policies restricting capitalism are often enacted because they ‘sound like good ideas.’ Unfortunately, these policies frequently have unintended consequences that work against the very goals they were intended to achieve.

The minimum wage is a good case in point. While many people are in favor of the minimum wage law, they support it because they think it helps low income families. The published scientific evidence, however, rejects this view and instead concludes that the minimum wage actually makes the intended beneficiaries worse off. So, for the same reason—the goal of helping those in need—economists are generally opposed to minimum wage legislation. This position can only be reached by examining all of the other indirect changes that happen as a result of a minimum wage, such as less worker training, fewer employee benefits, and most importantly fewer jobs and higher unemployment for low-skilled workers.

Again, it is important to remember that economics is a science, not a political position. We care little about the publicly stated intent or goal of the policy, and rather evaluate policy based on published research that examines real-world evidence. Good intentions are not enough to guarantee good outcomes. A few more examples will help to illustrate this important point.

The employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) were passed with the intention of lowering barriers to employment for disabled persons. The legislation prohibits discrimination based on disability status and further requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities. Has the ADA lived up to its stated intent? Has it expanded employment among the disabled?

Thomas DeLeire, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the employment effects of the ADA legislation when he was in graduate school at Stanford University. His research shows that the ADA has actually harmed the employment opportunities for disabled Americans. By increasing the cost of hiring disabled workers and making it harder to fire them, this legislation has resulted in a reduction in employment among disabled individuals. Prior to the ADA, 60 out of every 100 disabled men were able to find jobs. After the ADA went into effect, however, employment fell to less than 50 per 100 disabled men. After adjusting for other factors, DeLeire concludes that 80 percent of this decline was caused by the bad incentives created by the ADA. While the entire purpose of this legislation was to increase the employment opportunities for the disabled, the data simply do not support this view. Instead, the ADA seems to have made it more difficult and costly for employers to hire disabled workers, resulting in reduced job opportunities for disabled people. If the goal is to expand employment opportunities for disabled Americans, the research suggests that the ADA is not the answer.

Environmental policy often has the most devastating examples of unintended consequences. Under the Endangered Species Act, for example, large areas around the nesting grounds of the red-cockaded woodpecker can be declared ‘protected habitats,’ which then imposes stringent restrictions on the surrounding property owners. When the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Springs Lakes, North Carolina on notice that active nests were beginning to form near the town, it unleashed a frenzy of action on the part of the residents, but not of the type you might expect. Foreseeing the potential future restrictions on their property use, landowners swarmed the city hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. After removing the trees, the land would no longer be in danger of being declared an environmentally protected habitat because no future nests could form on the property.

Similar incidents have occurred throughout the range of this bird, and the total habitable nesting area for this species in the United States has fallen dramatically as a result of the poor incentive structure created by the law. The red-cockaded woodpecker has lost a significant portion of its habitat, moving it closer to extinction because of the unintended consequences of the Endangered Species Act.

As these examples illustrate, policy designed with even the best intentions can create unintended consequences that work against the original goal of the policy. The concept of unintended consequences vividly illustrates why having an economic ‘captain’ can often produce more harm for an economy than not having one.

One additional problem with government regulations is that there is no profit and loss-type system to eliminate bad policies throughout time. In the end, some policies just do not live up to their stated goals, or do so but at too high of a cost. West Virginia, for example, imposed a maximum eight hour operating restriction on taxi drivers. The law was intended to reduce driver fatigue and accidents involving taxis. Policy makers, however, overlooked the unintended consequences resulting from changing the incentives faced by cab drivers. With fewer hours to drive in a day, cab drivers started driving at faster speeds and took fewer breaks. Not only did the law result in a significant reduction in the number of cabs operating in the state, which led to more driving while intoxicated incidents, but it exacerbated the very problem it was designed to reduce. Even though there are fewer cabs on the road due to the law, the total number of accidents committed by cab drivers has increased in West Virginia since the regulation has been passed. Despite this information being widely-known, state policy makers in West Virginia do not ‘have the time to get the law off the books’ due to having to deal with too many other, more pressing, current issues. Simply put, government lawmakers just do not have the time to go back and look into the effectiveness of all laws from the past, nor the time to introduce the legislation to repeal them.

This highlights the need for Mississippi to reform its regulatory review process. Quite simply if a regulation adopted in Mississippi cannot prove, with data, that it is accomplishing its stated goal in a cost effective manner within some period of time, say five years, it should be repealed. Regulations, and other policies, should have to fight to stay in place based on scientific evidence regarding the costs and benefits they create.

This is an excerpt from Why Capitalism Works by Russell S. Sobel and J. Brandon Bolen. It was published in Promoting Prosperity in Mississippi.

After watching "The Masters" recently, I realized how much professional golf is like the free market.

Think about it. Golfers compete in one of the only major sports that does not use a socialistic design to ensure outcomes. There are no salaries, just winnings. You cannot guarantee outcomes in golf, only opportunities. The pay in pro golf is in direct proportion to a player's willingness to practice, prepare, and compete. Win or make cuts and you earn; miss cuts and you find a new profession or become a teaching pro. A golfer can decide not to play in a particular tournament or to play in every one, but the decision and consequence belongs to the golfer. No team plane takes golfers to tournaments; no team hotel rooms and meals are arranged and paid for; no team trainer wakes the golfer up and tells him where to be and when.

Golf is the ultimate in personal responsibility. And you can probably already tell golfers are my favorite athletes.

Many people believe pro golfers were born with a silver spoon and have not really "worked" to earn their economic status. They just walk around and hit a ball, they say. And they had to be rich to learn the sport in the first place.

The critics are wrong, though. It’s kind of the way many on the Left believe most high-earners and achievers somehow found their success on the backs of others rather than through schooling, dedication, sacrifice, discipline, talent, and time.

If you want proof the Left is wrong on golf, look at Arnie and Tiger. They’re arguably two of the best players in the history of the game. They’re certainly two of the biggest earners. Both were raised in working class families, not posh neighborhoods. They took advantage of their opportunities. They proved that, in this country, you have the opportunity to do and be just about anything if you are willing to put in the work and take the risk.

You know what else? Pro golfers, The Masters, the PGA, and other professional golf organizations are the biggest contributors to charity in all of professional sports. It isn't even close. More evidence that private enterprise and private citizens can do valuable and measurable things without government assistance.

If only we could govern the nation in such a limited way.

Golf is a beautiful example of an efficient, free-market system. The players respect the game, they respect the players who came before them, and they respect the amateurs and fans who keep the sport healthy. They wear their shirts tucked in, their hats on straight, and they shake hands with their competitors at the conclusion of the match—win, lose, or draw. America's children (and more than a few adults) could learn a lot from the game of golf.

Jon L. Pritchett (@tobaccoroadguy) is president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, the state’s non-partisan, free-market think tank. Prior to joining MCPP, Jon was senior vice president of the John Locke Foundation. He also worked as an investment banker, executive, and entrepreneur over a 28-year career in private business. His opinions have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Examiner, The Federalist, the Foundation for Economic Education, and many local newspapers.