When Donna Harris, a personal trainer from Madison, offered weight-loss advice, she was threatened with fines and jail.  That’s because according to Mississippi state officials, she was operating without a dietician license.

Absurd?  We thought so, which is why the Mississippi Justice Institute took up Donna’s case – and today won.

Weight-loss coaches are now free to offer their services in Mississippi – the most obese state in the nation according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent obesity numbers – without a government-issued license. Under a newly enacted regulation adopted by the Mississippi State Department of Health, any person can provide weight-loss advice for compensation so long as they do not attempt to treat a medical condition or hold themselves out as a licensed dietician.

Donna had decided to offer a two-month weight loss program after many of the participants in her group fitness classes asked her to. She set up a website and planned to offer basic dietary advice, recipes, and encouragement to her customers. 70 participants signed up immediately, paying $99 each. 

But then, Harris received a cease-and-desist letter from the Mississippi State Department of Health threatening her with up to six months in jail, a fine of up to $1,000, criminal charges, and a civil suit if she continued to discuss weight-loss strategies for money. The department said only registered dieticians could do that.

Harris, who has a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and master’s in occupational therapy, does not want to become a licensed dietitian, a profession that treats medical conditions through diet and requires 1,200 hours of supervised clinical practice, passing an exam, and paying a $300 fee. In 2024, a bachelor’s degree will no longer suffice for a Mississippi license, so Harris would have to get another graduate degree. 

Instead, Harris only sought to help people who wanted to slim down but were otherwise healthy. She had already started a Facebook group with hundreds of members where she gave free weight-loss advice. Her paid program would simply provide more one-on-one coaching to those who were interested. In 34 other states, no dietitian’s license is required for similar weight-loss programs.

Harris called the department and explained that she did not plan to treat medical conditions and had disclaimers on her website that she was not a registered dietician. But she was told that, without a license, she could only point people to government-approved information such as the food pyramid. 

Harris shut down her weight-loss program and refunded her customers. Then she sued the department for violating her constitutional right to free speech with the help of the Mississippi Justice Institute (MJI). The lawsuit argued that the department’s interpretation of the Mississippi Dietetics Practice Act amounted to government censorship of speech on the age-old topic of weight loss.

In response to the lawsuit, the Mississippi State Department of Health has now amended its regulations to allow unlicensed people to offer non-medical weight-loss advice as long as they do not claim to be a dietitian. The new regulation will go into effect on May 16, 2022.

“Allowing people to speak freely about general health and nutrition is a no-brainer, especially in a state like ours that struggles with obesity,” said Aaron Rice, the director of MJI. “The government should not be able to give any group a monopoly on speech about a common, everyday topic, like what food we should buy at the grocery store if we want to stay healthy or drop a few pounds. This new regulation will increase Mississippians’ access to important information about their health, while allowing more Mississippians to use their skills and knowledge to earn an honest living and provide for their families.” 

“I am thrilled that this law has finally been changed, not just for me, but so that other people who are knowledgeable about nutrition can share that information” said Harris. “Being told I couldn’t do that, and made to feel like I was some sort of criminal for trying to, was terrible. I can’t wait to start my own weight-loss program again and to witness the results and joy that I can help my customers achieve.”

For more information, contact Anika Page, director of operations at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, at (601) 969-1300 or [email protected]. 

The Mississippi Justice Institute is a nonprofit constitutional litigation center and the legal arm of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Elon Musk just announced he is offering to buy Twitter for $43 billion.

This is wonderful news – and anyone that believes in freedom and liberty should wish him well.

I’ve been on Twitter for over a decade, yet spend less and less time on it. What was once the most interesting social media site is often dull and occasionally a dump. It is not the folk that use Twitter that made it that way, but the people that run it. The success of the platform seems to have gone to their hipster heads.

Twitter users build up the number of people that follow them. It seems to me to be basic fair play that when you tweet something, it goes to those that signed up to follow you. Yet that no longer happens. Twitter management somewhere along the line decided that they would select what your followers did and did not get to see.

Putting twenty-something year old hipsters from California in charge of editorialising Twitter content has left the platform looking absurd. They have banned a former US President, yet are only too happy to keep hosting accounts that represent the leaders of Russia and Iran. Twitter users find themselves locked out of their accounts for stating basic biological facts.

Jonathan Haidt, one of my favourite thinkers, wrote a thoughtful essay in the Atlantic recently, attributing the polarization of America over the past ten years to the rise of social media. Instead of free speech, Twitter has produced fragmentation. Rather than a competition of ideas, Twitter has allowed some third rate hipsters to curate opinion.

I am delighted that Musk is trying to do something about it. Social media can – and I believe will – be so much better than it has become.

Elon Musk just slammed ESG - the Environment, Social and Governance process used to inform businesses as they make investment decisions. 

Thank goodness for Mr Musk.

ESG sounds like a good idea. What could be better than having high standards in business to help make the world a better place. Except that is not really what happens at all.

The faux moralism behind ESG is not necessarily a force for good. Take, for example, the issue of investing in oil and gas.

According to the ESG bureaucrats that infest many corporate compliance departments, investing in oil and gas is unethical. As a consequence, there has been some serious under investment in oil and gas - and over investment in renewable energy.

The only problem is that renewables are unreliable. So energy prices have increased. 

Where is the morality behind having older folk struggling to keep their homes warm? What is so moral about rising gas prices that make it harder for low income Americans to cope?

Capitalism works when capital is allocated productively. What ESG does is force capital to be allocated less productively.

Musk tweeted the other day about how producing something for another human being to meet their needs is a profoundly moral good. Indeed. Whether you make electric cars, satellites or burgers, that is much more ethical than anything emanating from a corporate compliance department could ever manage.

What would income tax elimination mean for you? Use our tool below to see how you and your family would fare under the House plan to eliminate income tax. Also see how much worse off you might be under the Senate plan.

1. Enter your county (double-click in the cell, for this step and the following steps)
2. Enter your income
3. Enter your car value
4. Enter your marital status

*Note: Both the Senate and House plans have changed since their original bills. This model reflects the tax plans as of 3/17/2022. 

*For best results, please view on a desktop computer

The components of the House bill:

1. Effective Jan. 1, 2023, increase the combined total of the personal exemption and the standard deduction from the current $8,300 to $40,000 for individuals, and for married couples from $16,600 to $80,000. After 2023, these amounts would potentially increase annually, based on the growth in government revenue, until all income is exempt from state income tax.
2. Increase the general sales tax and use tax rates from 7.0% to 8.5% effective July 1 of this year.
3. Reduce the sales tax rate on groceries (non-prepared food) from 7.0% to 5.5% effective July 1 of this year; then reduce it by a quarter-of-one-percent each July 1 for the next six years, to the final rate of 4%. Because cities receive from the state a portion of the sales tax derived from sales in their cities, the state would reimburse cities for the reduction in revenue from the decrease in the grocery tax.
4. Cut the “cost of a car tag” (which is really the cost of ad valorem tax on automobiles) by 50% to the taxpayer. However, because that tax is a local tax, the state would reimburse local governments to make up their lost revenue from this mandated cut in ad valorem taxes. This would be funded by a third (a half-percent) of the 1.5% increase in the general sales tax.

Link to the House bill.

The components of the Senate bill:

1. Eliminate, over four years, the 4% income tax bracket, which is now assessed on taxable income of $5,001-$10,000. This would, in the fourth year, be a $200 tax cut (4% x $5,000).
2. Cut sales tax on groceries from current 7% to 5% immediately (no phase in)
3. Eliminate the state fee attached to car tags ($5 or so per tag)
4. One-time rebate of 5% of last year’s tax liability, with a minimum of $100 and maximum of $1,000, which means most people will receive $100-$200.

Link to Senate bill.

Enterprising young people are abandoning decaying Democrat cities in search of a better life

Sunday Telegraph, March 27th, 2022

America is on the move. A rapid demographic change is under way, reshaping the nation’s economic, political and cultural contours. For as long as anyone can remember, America’s big business clusters were in the northeast, the midwest and California. New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles were the kinds of places where enterprising young Americans would go to make their way in the world.

Not anymore. In just 12 months between July 2020 and July 2021, these four cities lost over 700,000 people. A very different phenomenon is playing out in conservative states, especially in the south. Almost 80 per cent of the population growth in 2021 happened in a mere 10 counties. Five of the fastest growing counties were in Texas and two in Florida. The fastest of all was Maricopa county in Arizona, which is rapidly filling up with large numbers of Californian emigres.

What do the growth states have in common? They favour freedom. From snow-capped Utah to swampy Florida, geography and climate are not the decisive factor; state politics is. As free states thrive, radical progressives drive businesses away from their traditional hubs. Last year, Elon Musk relocated Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas. Thousands of lower-profile businesses have made the same move.

While California combines European level taxation with third-world level public services, free states such as Texas, Tennessee and Florida do not have a state income tax at all. In New York and Silicon Valley, permits are needed for almost anything, yet Arizona and Utah have imposed radical red-tape reduction plans.

Contemporary America remains bitterly divided between these two tribes. Conservative America drives pick-up trucks, prefers its taxes low and its government small. Here, the Oath of Allegiance is pledged daily, and American exceptionalism accepted as self-evident. Progressive America, on the other hand, drives a Prius rather than a pick-up and is far more likely to worry about climate change. This tribe has a fundamentally different conception of what America is, was and ought to be, and prefers to focus on intersectional identity above any kind of exceptionalism.

Opinion formers in Britain, citing Biden’s win over Trump, often assume that America is moving inexorably towards a more progressive future. Yet a rather different picture is emerging.

States aren’t just depopulating due to an exodus of enterprising people. Progressive America is literally dying; deaths in Democrat cities and states have started to exceed births. Though birth rates have fallen across the board in the past decade, it has been most pronounced in places where folk have gone woke, perhaps losing interest in raising a family in the process. Women in conservative America on average marry significantly younger than they do in progressive states.

As Chicagoans and Californians flood into Texas, Arizona and Tennessee in search of a better life, many conservatives fear that they will bring their progressive voting habits with them. A more optimistic scenario is that as the most entrepreneurial abandon progressive controlled areas in favour of free ones, they will merely reinforce the intensely individualistic mindset that already exists there.

What is certain is that two models of American identity are engaged in a fierce battle at a federal level. Because the US system allows interstate competition, here in Mississippi we are leading a campaign to abolish the state income tax. We have written a new law on universal occupational licensing to make it easier for outsiders to come and work here.

What if this kind of localism were normal in Britain? What sort of innovation could be unleashed? You would not have to kill time hoping for Boris Johnson to fix things anymore than we are waiting on Joe Biden.

Douglas Carswell is the president and CEO of the Mississippi Centre for Public Policy.

Today the Mississippi Senate and House appear to have reached a compromise deal on income tax cuts.

Commenting on the news, President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Douglas Carswell said:

“This tax cut is great news for Mississippi.  With the cost of living rising, exempting every Mississippi worker from paying income tax on the first $18,000 earned is welcome.”

“It is good that some of our state’s $1.2 billion surplus is being used to give taxpayers back some of their own money.  However, this package is more modest than we would like to have seen.

“This is a good first step but it is not full income tax elimination.  Under this proposal, in 2026 the legislature will still need to agree further reductions.” 

“There is a danger that the Mississippi government will not tax to get the money it needs, but finds a need for the money it gets”.

“While this a step forward towards eventual income tax elimination, Mississippi still needs bold, game-changing policy changes if our state is not to continue to rank 50^th out of 50 states by many metrics”.

This weekend, as the 2022 session is wrapping up, the Mississippi Senate Rules committee made the unusual move of passing a suspension resolution (SCR 588) to bring a failed bill back to life. The bill is SB 2033, sponsored by three Republicans and eleven Democrats. The bill seeks to expand Medicaid to able-bodied women for up to a year after either an abortion or the birth of a child.

While some have framed the proposal as a way to help pregnant women, there is little evidence such a proposal would actually help women.  Under SB 2033, Medicaid coverage for women would be covered for 12 months instead of the current 2 months required by federal law. This proposal has been sold as a “pro-life” bill because it expands taxpayer-subsidized insurance to women. This logic is deeply flawed, and, frankly, insulting to the pro-life movement. In addition, there is little evidence that this bill will reduce either maternal mortality or infant mortality in Mississippi.

Expanding Postpartum Medicaid Coverage is Not Pro-life

Expanding Medicaid to able-bodied adults is not pro-life. There are several reasons for this.

In the first place, it is important to note that Mississippi Medicaid actually covers abortion in limited, but morally questionable, cases. Federal law requires Mississippi Medicaid to pay for abortions in cases of rape and incest. In addition, Mississippi has opted to allow for Medicaid coverage of abortions in cases of "fetal impairment," which could include chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. This policy potentially conflicts with the state's Life Equality Act passed in 2020, which explicitly prohibits abortions on the basis of a genetic abnormality.

Therefore, any expansion of Medicaid in the state to women of child-bearing age must be understood as an expansion of state-funded abortion within these parameters. This is especially true for the current proposal to expand postpartum Medicaid, which of course exclusively applies to women of child-bearing age.

Furthermore, postpartum Medicaid expansion creates the potential for a perverse incentive that could ultimately lead to women having more frequent abortions.

Under federal law (42 C.F.R. § 440.210(a)(2)(i)-(ii)), postpartum Medicaid coverage applies as follows:

"For women who, while pregnant, applied for, were eligible for, and received Medicaid services under the plan, all services under the plan that are pregnancy-related for an extended postpartum period. The postpartum period begins on the last day of pregnancy and extends through the end of the month in which the 60-day period following termination of pregnancy ends."

On the surface, it might seem that postpartum coverage applies to women who carry their baby to birth, but federal law defines the period as beginning “following termination.” That seems to include abortion and involuntary miscarriage.

If a woman ends a pregnancy through abortion, she would theoretically be eligible for postpartum Medicaid for 12 months after she ended the pregnancy, just in the same way as a woman who had naturally miscarried or carried her baby to full term.

Theoretically, this means that a woman could have an abortion every 12 months and stay on Medicaid indefinitely. This is all the more possible insofar as SB 2033 does not require any ongoing eligibility checks.

More problematic is that Medicaid is a major source of funding for Planned Parenthood. According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, government funding for Planned Parenthood, including Medicaid, is almost $1.7 million per day.

The Hattiesburg Planned Parenthood accepts Medicaid. Included among the services they offer are “abortion referrals,” “the morning-after pill” and “LGBTQ services.”

Mississippi also covers “family planning” for one year after a pregnant woman enrolls in Medicaid. This family planning waiver is incredibly generous in terms of the categories covered: women and men earning up to 194 percent of the federal poverty level ($55,236 for a family of four) and including individuals aged 13 to 44. It is presumed that Planned Parenthood is a major provider of services under this waiver in Mississippi.

Expanding Medicaid postpartum from 2 months to 12 months, however, will benefit Planned Parenthood even more, as women who have just had a baby are more likely to use contraception to space out childbirth. Indeed, the average time between births in the United States is about 26 months. Expanding postpartum coverage to 12 months, at a minimum, allows women who are not eligible for family planning services to access these services – again, to the benefit of providers like Planned Parenthood.

Medicaid Already Covers Parents and Caretakers of Children

The most misleading aspect of this attempt to expand Medicaid to able-bodied adults is the failure to disclose that Medicaid already covers the parents of children on Medicaid!

According to the Mississippi Division of Medicaid:

"Parents or caretakers must have children under age 18 living in the home, who are deprived of the support of one or both parents due to the disability of a parent, the death or continued absence of a parent or have parent(s) who are unemployed or have very low income."

This means that parents who are unemployed, single or who have very low income are already eligible for Medicaid. Who, then, does this Medicaid expansion cover?

• Women who are NOT single parents.
• Women who are NOT unemployed.
• Women who are older than age 18.
• Women who earn less than $55,236 for a family of four.

This hardly sounds like the vulnerable population Mississippi taxpayers are being led to think will benefit from this Medicaid expansion.

In addition, it’s worth pointing out that while the federal government covers about 85 percent of the costs of Medicaid coverage, women that enroll on the Obamacare exchange are covered at 100 percent. And, under the Biden administration, eligibility categories for Obamacare have increased expansively.

An additional concern is that every expansion of Medicaid actually increases costs for those on private insurance. Thus, while expanding Medicaid to 12 months for postpartum women might seem like an idea that would lower healthcare costs, it actually has the potential to increase costs for everyone else.

Maternal and Infant Mortality Claims Need Further Study

Many of the arguments for postpartum Medicaid expansion are based upon claims that Mississippi has among the highest rates of postpartum mortality. Some have claimed that the reason for these statistics simply must be a lack of government health care.

Many of the advocates for postpartum Medicaid expansion have referenced a report produced by the Maternal Mortality Review Committee, claiming that the report demonstrates the need for postpartum Medicaid expansion. These committees are funded by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and, predictably, always arrive at the same conclusion: expand Medicaid.

The claims that are being drawn from the Mississippi report require additional study, to say the least.  

A careful reading of the data in the report reveals that many of the deaths listed in the report have little or nothing to do with pregnancy. For example, there are a total of 136 deaths listed in the report from 2013 to 2016. Many of these deaths were unrelated to pregnancy and largely unpreventable from a health insurance perspective. This includes motor vehicle accidents (24 percent), homicide (7 percent), fire (3 percent), and other causes that had little to do with pregnancy.

Even more to the point, Mississippi’s report acknowledges the following:

"The majority of maternal deaths occurred in the postpartum period including 37% occurring after 6 weeks and involve women insured by state Medicaid (p. 23)."

In other words, the majority of maternal deaths involved women ALREADY on Medicaid. It is beyond dispute that Medicaid health outcomes are not very good – in fact, worse than the uninsured, who tend to pay cash for healthcare (see, for instance, J. Taylor: “Medicaid: A Government Monopoly that Hurts the Poor” (2018)). But if even the Maternal Mortality Review Committee is acknowledging that the majority of maternal deaths involve women on Medicaid, it seems obvious that expanding Medicaid to postpartum women is a bad idea. Indeed, it may be Medicaid that is the problem.

Big Tech has had a wave of complaints leveled against it in recent years, and perhaps rightly so. From assertions of censorship, to excessive digital control, the companies have come under increasing scrutiny. In light of these tensions, some have called for Big Tech companies to be broken up all together, using a policy lever known as antitrust. But is this the best approach?

Many of the grievances against Big Tech carry a lot of weight. Yet, at the same time, Big Tech companies have achieved their large market shares by offering services that have benefitted consumers. Using the power of emerging technologies, consumers have been able to grow their businesses, connect with friends, and engage with society.

This brings in the question of whether or not antitrust is the best way to address the Big Tech challenges. Is an antitrust breakup of Big Tech companies the answer? Isn't there an ever-slight possibility that Big Government solutions could turn out to be worse than the problems with Big Tech itself?

What is antitrust?

In order to understand this debate, it is crucial to define antitrust. At the foundation, antitrust is a collection of laws that seek to ensure competition in the open market. How these laws are interpreted and applied has been a hinge point of the debate.

When antitrust was first instituted in the early 1900s, it was meant to break up the industrial monopolization practices that affected market competition, especially in the oil, rail, and steel sectors. Many of the companies engaged in practices that deliberately sought to corner the market, and then they would charge consumers higher prices for lower quality.

Initially, a company's size and market dominance were often key factors in whether it could be broken up. However, as antitrust law developed, the "Consumer Welfare Standard" became the key litmus test. Under this standard, antitrust action to break up a company can only occur if a company engages in monopolization practices that actually harm consumer welfare.

The danger of government not using the consumer welfare test for antitrust  

Contrasted with this consumer welfare test is when the government simply goes after "big" companies if they have a large market share. This carries the presumption that if a company outperforms most competitors, it must be engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Such actions go against the purpose of antitrust. After all, antitrust is meant to help consumers, not competitors.  

Thus, if antitrust is indiscriminately used as a cudgel to hit large technology companies without having a consumer-grounded reason, this sets a dangerous precedent. In a capitalistic society, companies exist to serve customers and generate capital. Companies growing to be large and serving millions of consumers is a trophy of free-market success. This should be celebrated, not punished.

The Big Tech issue is complex

Yet we return to the question of how to address bad actors within the companies collectively known by many as Big Tech. The issues are complex, and like most complex issues, a broad and heavy-handed government bureaucracy is not the answer.

Rather, specific issues within the Big Tech context should be addressed within the confines of that specific issue. This is critical. While blanket approaches to solving problems may carry political weight, a broad expansion of government power is dangerous. In the words of Ronald Reagan: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

In most cases, companies that provide poor services will decline because consumers will not support them with their spending money. The forces of consumer choice have the ability to damage bad actors and poor-performing companies far more than a policymaker ever could. Whether it likes or not, every company is ultimately accountable to the market.

However, this is not to say that policymakers should abdicate their responsibility to address the public policy questions surrounding Big Tech. Rather, they should consider these issues with calculated precision.

If the issue is far-reaching social media censorship, then policymakers should carefully consider that specific issue. If the issue is algorithmic election interference, then policymakers should specifically consider that issue as well. Contrasted with addressing these specific questions, a broad application of antitrust just to "cut down tech companies to size" is not the solution.

Free market growth should not be jeopardized

An antitrust policy that seeks to break up a company because of its size and market share is tantamount to punishing the success it achieved through consumer choice. Rather than using the paradigm that "big is bad," antitrust policy should stick to the consumer welfare standard that takes this consumer choice into account.

We’ve won!  Governor Tate Reeves today signed our bill to combat Critical Race theory into law!

Critical Race theory is an extremist ideology. It maintains that the United States is founded on racial supremacy and oppression.  Rather than treating each of us as an individual, it invites us to re-racialize every aspect of our lives.  

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy’s report on Critical Race theory, published in October, presented clear evidence that Critical Race theory is being promoted in Mississippi schools and universities.

We also published model legislation as part of that report – model legislation which today becomes law.

Contrary to some of the claims that have been made, our bill does not ban the teaching of history.  Nor does it undermine the teaching of the history of the Civil Rights movement.  

Our bill seeks to ensure that public schools and universities do not “compel students to personally affirm” that “any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior”.

Those that oppose this bill need to explain what part of that they find objectionable?  Do opponents of the bill really want to allow teachers to compel students to believe in the inherent superiority of fellow Americans?  

Mississippi has taken a lead in confronting this ideology.  We are certain other US states will now follow our lead.