Last week, Mississippi lawmakers finally stumbled into the 21st century and decided that adults—yes, grown-ups—should be allowed to buy wine online.
A round of applause for Senators Michel, Blackmon, England, and DeLano, who convinced their colleagues that Mississippians should be allowed to do something they do in almost every other state. Until now, if you wanted a bottle of wine, you had to head to the store and buy only what the Alcoholic Beverage Control board had approved.
But don’t uncork the champagne just yet. This bill only just squeaked through the Senate, with 21 so-called “conservative” senators clutching their pearls and trying to smother it in its crib. Why, you ask? What possible reason would any politician have to stop you buying wine online? I do wonder if anyone at the legislature was wined and dined - probably both - by lobbyists for wine distributors who'd rather not compete with online retailers. That it took years to pass something this basic should alarm every conservative in our state. That so many “conservatives” were ready to leap to the defense of various vested interests is depressing. How many lobbyist-funded dinners does it take to kill good conservative policy?
Right this minute there are still lots of great conservative bills alive in the 2025 legislature. But if it is this hard to let people buy Merlot online, what hope is there for the big stuff? School choice? Cutting red tape? Eliminating DEI? The good news is that right now there are still lots of great conservative bills alive in the 2025 legislature. Good conservative lawmakers could still achieve great conservative wins this session.
The House has a plan to eliminate the income tax — imagine keeping more of your own money; radical, I know. Having passed their bill HB 1, the House has decided to hold off passing any legislation from the Senate until the Senate actually does something to eliminate the income tax. Another excellent conservative proposal is HB1435, which would allow public to public school choice. Approved by the House, it is currently being considered by a committee in the Senate. It’s a similar story with HB 922, authored by the awesome Representatives Zuber and Creekmore. This bill would repeal a lot of the red tape that prevents new health care providers operating in our state.
Both the House and the Senate have approved different bills to combat DEI. Again, this is something every conservative should not hesitate to support. If our lawmakers were to complete the passage of these bills, it would be a vintage year for liberty in our state. But the danger is that these bills, like efforts to restore the ballot initiative, are quietly garroted in a back room at the Capitol.
For years, we have seen solid conservative policies get “killed in committee.” Don’t be fooled about what that means. When a bill “dies in committee,” it’s not a natural death. The committee chairman didn’t misplace it under a stack of memos — it was knifed, Julius Caesar-style. Only instead of togas, it’s cheap suits and lobbyist cash.
The next couple of weeks will be critical. As with the online wine bill, we could see good conservative lawmakers pass good conservative laws. If they do, they deserve a medal—or at least a decent glass of Cabernet. Or it could be that those Governor Tate Reeves calls “the Coalition of the Status Quo”, once again kill off the chance of change. I will be sure to keep you updated about the progress of each of these critical conservative policies, and let you know who supports them, and who, if anyone, fails to support them.
How much do you imagine it costs to send a child to public school in Hinds County every year? $5,000 per year? Maybe $10,000? $15,000?
Actually, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Education, when you divide the number of students attending school by the total expenditure, in 2023-24 Hinds County spent $16,589 per student.
That is more than twice the average private school fees in our state. Indeed, $16,589 is not far off what it would cost to send your child to a top private school.
Now ask yourself if each child in Hinds County is getting a top education for that $16,589? Of course not. A large chunk of the kids can’t read or do basic math. One in three of them regularly skip school.
So, why not give families in Hinds County the right to take a portion of that $16,589 and allocate it to a school of their choice?
It’s not just Hinds County. The same question could be asked in Madison ($17,037 spent for every public school pupil per year) or Rankin ($15,198 per pupil per year), or Canton ($18,683) or De Soto ($13,820).
Even if you take the Department of Education’s own more conservative figure for per pupil spending (which includes all the ‘no-show’ students), Mississippi still spends an average of $14,676 per student.
Despite all that money, 4 in 10 fourth graders in Mississippi public schools cannot read properly. Eight in 10 eighth grade kids in Mississippi were not proficient in math in 2022. One in 4 kids routinely skips school.
Nor has $14,676 per student spending translated into better teacher pay. Notwithstanding recent pay increases, our teachers still earn significantly less than they did in 2010, when you adjust for inflation.
If you happen to be one of the fortunate families happy with the public education options available, great. No need to change and no one is proposing any changes that will affect you. But why not allow those families unhappy how things are the freedom to take their tax dollars to a school that best meets their needs?
Suggesting this provokes outrage not from parents, but from various vested interests who like things the way they are. They like a system that puts the $14,676 they get for your child into their administration budget, rather than the classroom. School superintendents making more than the Governor want to keep control of their multimillion dollar budgets for a reason. It’s a boondoggle for bureaucrats.
School Choice will not impoverish public schools. The legislation that Speaker Jason White is proposing would allow families control over the state portion of funding, not locally raised revenues or federal dollars.
In Hinds County, for example, that would mean families being able to allocate no more than $6,700 of the $16,589 overall per pupil funding. (Rather than depleting Hinds County public schools’ budget, actually it would make Hinds County better off in terms of per pupil spend.)
Giving families control over $6,700 of the state funds will not mean a flood of kids coming into your well run school district. Why not? Because the legislation proposed specifically gives school boards the final say on capacity.
What anti School Choice campaigners really fear is not the “wrong” kids coming to your school. What they fear is that you start wondering what the heck they’ve been doing with the $14,676 they get for your child or grandchild every year.
All of the arguments we are now hearing against School Choice in Mississippi have been heard in each of the surrounding states that have since adopted School Choice.
Alabama’s new Educations Savings Account program, which has just opened for applications, has been wildly oversubscribed. The program provides $7,000 funding per student attending a participating private school, while those enrolled in home education programs are eligible for $2,000 per student.
Arkansas allows all K-12 students access to an Education Savings Account from 2025, into which the state government pays the state portion of per pupil funding ($6,600 per year). Families will be able to use this $6,600 money they are given to pay for their child education, including private school tuition. Arkansas also allows public to public school transfers, allowing districts to define capacity.
Louisiana’s GATOR program starts in 2025-26 and establishes an Education Savings Account for those on low incomes, with the details are still being finalized as the law only recently passed. Louisiana already has public to public School Choice.
Texas and Tennessee, too, are at this very moment debating legislation that would create a universal Education Savings Account for families in those states, too.
None of the scare stories we now hear in Mississippi materialised in any of these neighboring states. None of these states has been bankrupted like the critics claimed by letting mom and dad have parent power. Instead, all the evidence suggests School Choice has started to improve education outcomes.
Did you know that Mississippi is now one of the fastest growing states in America? Only two states saw real GDP rise faster than it did here in the third quarter of 2024.
Were you aware that personal income in our state rose more here than almost anywhere in the US this past year?
New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that Mississippi is on the up.
For as long as anyone can remember, Mississippi has ranked 50th out of 50. Not for much longer, perhaps. According to this new data, ours’s was one of the top performing states in 2024. If we keep growing for the next few years the way we did in 2024, we won’t be bottom of the class for much longer.
Mississippi’s success is not an accident. It’s a consequence of a number of key free market reforms:
- Labor market deregulation, with an Occupational Licensing law in 2021.
- Tax cuts with legislation to cut the state income tax to a flat 4 percent in 2022.
- Further tax reform to make it more tax efficient for businesses in 2023.
- Education funding reform as a step towards school choice in 2024.
These reforms have begun to energize our state. They make it easier for people to get ahead, for businesses to invest, and for families to spend their income on their priorities. They draw in inward investment, which is changing our state for the better.
If Mississippi is not to lose this momentum, we need to go even further. That is why MCPP has just published a Blueprint for Mississippi – a list of the ten key reforms that would lift our state to the top of the economic table.
The number one reform we need to prosper is school choice. Why? School choice is the only way to be certain of raising standards. The better job we do of educating young people, the greater their chances of leading a prosperous, fulfilling life.
Our Blueprint sets out how we can accomplish school choice, giving every family in our state the choices that today only the very rich enjoy.
To prosper, our state needs less regulation and less government. Our Blueprint sets out proposals to cut taxes further and dismantle the costly, leftist bureaucracy that seems to be in control no matter who you vote for.
Decades of crony cartel politics has stifled innovation in our state. Years of lobbyists cutting cozy deals in the Capitol that commercially advantage their clients has held Mississippi back. A lot of the intentionally restrictive laws that limit health care provision simply need to go. Our Blueprint sets out how to make this happen.
MCPP has been a driving force behind many of the key free market reforms that have helped energize our state. But at every opportunity, crony cartel politics has tried to prevent change.
The crony cartel will try again. It’s what self-serving cartels do. Already they are mobilizing half-baked arguments against school choice. They are lobbying to maintain intentionally restrictive laws that hold back the healthcare economy. Brace yourself for politicians explaining why we can’t afford tax cuts despite a healthy surplus.
In politics, nothing moves unless it is pushed. MCPP won’t just publish our Blueprint. We will push and push hard. Mississippi’s future is too important to let bad politics get in the way.
Mississippi could be on the cusp of transformative changes. If we keep going, we will not only no longer be 50th, but we could become – like Tennessee or Alabama – a state that young people want to move to, not leave.
Download a copy of our blueprint here!
Imagine a world in which the President of the United States could prevent you from reading a story about incriminating emails found on his son’s laptop?
Actually, that’s what happened. When the New York Post ran a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, administration officials put pressure on media outlets to prevent you from reading it.
Envision an America in which articles about the origins of Covid could be taken down by administration officials during the pandemic? You don’t have to imagine. That’s literally what they did.
If you are appalled at the prospect of powerful politicians trying to suppress awkward opinions, I suspect you’d be concerned at any attempts by some in our state to restrict debate and discussion on certain topics, too.
Unfortunately, some state officials seem to think they can bully organizations like MCPP in order to shut down what we say. This seems to be the case with school choice, an issue on which every conservative ought to agree. Some evidently don’t agree and are mad at us for promoting change.
MCPP is 100 percent committed to parental choice as the only certain way to raise standards and counter left- wing values in the classroom. We relish the opportunity to listen to those with different ideas and engage with those that have a different viewpoint.
Anyone is free to disagree with us. But no one that disagrees with our stance should ever try to shut down our advocacy the way Biden’s gang shut down the Hunter laptop story.
Here’s why we won’t be cowed.
First, it’s a question of credibility: MCPP is a conservative think tank. That means we’re cheerleaders for conservative policies, but not for any politicians.
To be sure, we probably agree 90 percent of the time with most elected state-wide officials. But when we disagree, we won’t hide the fact. Instead, we will do so openly, honestly and dispassionately (maybe even using a little humor from time to time ….) A think tank that shied away from asking state leaders questions that they’d rather not answer wouldn’t be worth a dime. Why would anyone take such an organization seriously?
Second, you are the media: Biden’s gang, like politicians down the ages, tried to bully media organizations into ignoring inconvenient stories. That tactic doesn’t work anymore since Musk set social media free.
Each week, MCPP reaches tens of thousands of folk across our state. We do so with published articles and media appearances. But the single biggest way we reach people is directly, the way I’m connecting with you now. Our email list has tens of thousands of subscribers, and a phenomenal open rate. This Wednesday, I uploaded a short video in the morning. By lunchtime it had been viewed 48,000 times. As of now, it’s been seen over 130,000 times – a high percentage in Mississippi. Thanks to Elon Musk’s X, we reach several million people every month, again many in Mississippi. Unless anyone has the power to shut down our social media operation, we are going to keep going.
Third, and most important, School Choice is right: School choice is, as President Trump has said, the civil rights issue of our time.
It's more than about school standards. The case for giving families control over their child’s share of tax dollars is moral. MCPP has outlined a three-step strategy to achieve universal school choice in our state. We are surrounded on three sides by conservative led states that have adopted school choice.
People are free to disagree with us. So, too, are state-wide officials who can vote against school choice or kill it in committee (like some did with the ballot initiative, and anti DEI legislation and much more besides). But equally organizations like MCPP are free to explain to the public who is supporting school choice and who is trying to kill it. We won’t be cowed.
Of course, what made the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop so explosive was not what was on the laptop. It was the realization as to what some were prepared to do to suppress stories they didn’t like. Nothing perhaps could be more ruinous the reputation of any politician.
What do you most like about your job? For me, it is being invited to speak about the work the Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP) is doing to try to improve our state. Typically, I get a couple of invitations each month to talk at Rotary Clubs, schools or the Kiwanis. Just the other week, I received one such invitation from the North Jackson Rotary Club.
As invited to, I talked about some of our policy goals, such as school choice, deregulation and tax reform. Ever sensitive to the fact that good folk have different opinions about things, I meticulously avoided saying anything even remotely partisan. Rotary Club lunches are enjoyable precisely because they are committed to building goodwill and understanding.
As I sat down after speaking, however, up popped Luther Munford, someone I had only met on my way into the event. Mr. Munford proceeded to attack school choice – and at times I almost felt, me - at length, all under the guise of asking a question. Fair enough, I thought. Free speech and all that, although Mr. Munford did not sound very big on goodwill. In fact, he sounded borderline rude.
I thought no more of the incident until I read Mr. Munford’s recent newspaper article in which he appears to have continued the attack he started at the North Jackson Rotary Club. Curiously, for an article purporting to be about school choice in Mississippi, he launched his article with an attack on Brexit. Aware as he is of my role as one of the founders of the official Brexit campaign back in my native Britain, Mr. Munford perhaps thinks that by attacking the way 45 million Brits voted he is somehow getting at me. Whatever.
Once Mr. Munford gets around to attacking school choice, rather than me, he makes a series of erroneous assumptions that deserve a rebuttal.
Mr. Munford says school choice is unpopular. This is just not true. Polls show that more than 7 in 10 Mississippi voters, including a majority of Democrats, want school choice. Mr. Munford seems especially vexed by the idea that parents given the choice might want their children to attend a religious school. Assuming I have understood him correctly (his syntax is a little garbled) school choice would mean that “the problem of funding truly racists religious beliefs becomes even greater”.
Any suggestion that Mississippi private schools are full of “racist religious beliefs” will no doubt come as a surprise to anyone that attends or teaches at one. Mr. Munford then attacks private schools on the basis that “no one knows how well Mississippi private schools are doing because they are not subject to any form of public accountability”.
Again, plain wrong. Private schools are hyper accountable to fee paying parents. It is the public school accountability system that is failing, giving A grades to school districts where many kids can’t read properly.
Mr. Munford then proceeds to attack school choice on the basis that it would take money out of the public sector. Allowing each public school student to take their base share of state funds (about $6,600) to a public school of their choice (assuming the public school has capacity) would not impoverish the public sector. It would reallocate the money, forcing failing schools and underperforming districts to raise their game.
Our plan for a Mississippi Parents’ Tax Credit for those that choose not to take their place at a public school, because they prefer to home school or go private, would be capped at $150 million. It is not draining money from public schools but supporting families that are currently paying twice.
What I find hardest to understand about Luther Munford’s attack on school choice is that he sent his own children to one of the most expensive private schools in our state, St Andrew’s.
Luther Munford is on record as saying he “believes strongly in public education”. But not strongly enough to send his own kids to public school.
Mr. Munford attacks putting money into private religious schools because of the risk of “racist religious beliefs”. I presume there were no such beliefs at St Andrew’s Episcopal School when his own kids went there? He attacks private schools for not being accountable. When he was a parent at St Andrew’s was there not sufficient accountability to him as a parent?
Perhaps if one were to ask why, as an advocate of public education, Mr. Munford did not take the opportunity to send his own kids to, say, Murrah High School, he might have an explanation as to why his family circumstances were different. Anti school choice activists need to recognize that every family’s circumstances are different. That’s why families need to be able to make choices about their children’s education that currently only people like Mr. Munford are able to make.
Sending a child to St Andrew’s today costs about $20,000 a year. We should all support parents’ 100 percent if they are blessed enough to be able to send their children to such an awesome school. But we should at the same time help local families that cannot afford that to allocate their $6,600 of state funding to a school they can get into. To do anything else could be called hypocrisy.
Local mom, Amanda Kibble, is celebrating an important win for her family, and for school choice.
Earlier this year, Governor Tate Reeves signed HB 1341 into law. This new law gives military families in Mississippi the right to transfer their children to any traditional public school around the state, assuming that the receiving school has capacity. Early indications suggest this is extremely popular, with lots of military families using school choice to switch schools.
Amanda, and her family, found out the hard way that the law might not apply to those who serve their country in the National Guard. There was a real risk that Amanda’s son might lose his place at his preferred school.
That’s when Amanda approached MCPP, and we took up her case. MCPP has a long history of fighting for school choice, and our legal arm, the Mississippi Justice Institute has successfully litigated in defense of school choice.
I am delighted that Attorney General, Lynn Fitch, has now issued an opinion that the new school choice law for military families also applies, at least in part, to those in the National Guard. Three cheers for the AG!
If military families now have public-to-public school choice, why shouldn’t everybody? That is exactly what our “Move Up, Mississippi!” campaign aims to achieve.
This week’s win for school choice makes it all the more disappointing that the new State Superintendent for Education, Lance Evans, took a sideswipe at school choice recently.
Speaking at a lunch in Jackson, Evans criticized school choice, suggesting that if a single dollar of public money went into private schools, those private schools should be subjected to the regulatory oversight that public schools are subject to.
Those that oppose school choice, and indeed I suspect Mr. Evans, know full well that extending state oversight across the private school sector would be untenable – which is why they suggest it. But it is not the clever argument against school choice that they might imagine.
Giving every family in our state the right to choose a public school, as military families are now able to do, would not transfer public dollars into private schools.
Amanda Kibble and those military families that now have school choice are not taking money out of public schools. Does Lance Evans oppose their right to choose a school for their child?
MCPP proposes that under a separate program, families that attend private schools, or who home school, could get a tax credit reflecting the fact that they are already paying for a place at a public school that they are not taking.
Evans attack on parent power was not the worst of it. More disappointing was the plodding presentation that preceded it about how amazing education is in our state.
Evans trumpeted the fact that about a third of districts were rated D or F in 2016. Now only a handful are rated D or F. This, he implied, was evidence of progress, rather than a reflection of a broken accountability system.
When officials invoke the broken grading system as evidence of improvement, it is not just the credibility to the grading we should question.
How bizarre, that in a solidly Republican-run state, we have somehow ended up with an anti-school choice official in charge? Are the nine-member State Board of Education aware of Evans’ anti-school choice position? Are the various state leaders that appointed those members of the Board?
Since 2000, the number of students in America has increased by 5 percent. The number of teachers by around 10 percent. The number of education administrators, however, has shot up by 95 percent.
No wonder the education bureaucrats don’t want mom and dad to have control over where their child’s share of the education budget goes. They might start to demand that it goes into the classroom.
Lance Evans talked about making private schools accountable. Private schools already are accountable to every fee-paying parent. The issue is how to ensure that public schools are made similarly accountable, too.
We need to give every family in our state the public-to-public school choice that military families now have.
You can tell a lot about someone’s politics given what they might have to say about the conviction of Donald Trump.
Anyone telling you that Trump’s conviction is comeuppance for a sordid hush-money scandal, in which he broke the law, probably leans left.
Someone explaining that it was all a disgraceful attempt by Joe Biden’s Democrats to stop the 45th President from being re-elected, is likely to be a conservative.
In an increasingly post-religious society, politics has become a substitute belief system for many. The danger is that we view everything through the prism of politics.
Rather than ask what Trump’s conviction means for your side in the Reds versus Blues battle, perhaps what we ought to reflect on what this might all mean for America.
For most of human history, the law meant whatever the powerful said it meant. Anyone who has ever tried to do business in Russia or China knows that’s still the way things are in much of the non-Western world.
A system in which the law is elevated above the executive – in which the rule of law has supremacy – is historically unusual. Indeed, it is largely the creation of people who spoke and wrote in the language in which you are reading this.
It was English-speaking civilization that invented the notion that the powerful are constrained by rules, and that the rules should apply to everyone equally. A straight line runs from Magna Carta at Runnymede to the Founders at Philadelphia. The US Bill of
Rights of 1789 was preceded by an English Bill of Rights of 1689.
America has become the most successful society on earth precisely because in this Republic, government doesn’t get to change the rules as it likes.
“Exactly!” the anti-Trumpers will say. “Trump’s conviction is true to that tradition! Even former Presidents are subject to the same rules as everyone else”.
But is that really so? In what way has Trump been subjected to the same set of rules? Surely, those on the right will say, he has been singled out, prosecuted over something essentially trivial?
Those that brought the charges, it seems to me, were motivated by politics, rather than justice.
Prosecuting political rivals is what they do in Russia, Brazil or Malaysia. It is awful to see political prosecutions in the United States – and it bodes ill for the future of freedom in this country and around the world.
Twenty years ago, George Bush’s electoral strategist, Karl Rove, hit upon the idea of using ‘wedge-issues’ to galvanize the conservative base. At the time, Rove seemed to be remarkably successful. Republicans won.
Two decades on, I wonder if it was partly Rove’s ‘wedge-issue’ approach that provoked the left into doing something similar. Under Obama, the left became increasingly inflammatory. Perhaps there is a straight line that runs from the politics of ‘wedge-issues’ in the noughties to the culture wars we see today?
Some on the left might be tempted to celebrate the use of lawfare to try to take down a political opponent. They might want to stop and think first. It is, I worry, only a question of time before we start to see something similar from the right.
If lawfare becomes part of American politics, what chance is there that the United States remains exceptional compare with all those other less happy republics?
It is not just the legal process that America needs to de-politicize. We need to stop making everything a question of where you stand in the culture war. Your views on Disney or money management, Taylor Swift or Chick-Fil-A should not automatically correlate with the way you vote.
If it is politics alone that gives you a belief system in life, you are going to end up desperately disappointed with both politics and life.
The United States was founded by people that believed that to survive, a Republic needs a moral citizenry. America needs to believe in something above politics and beyond the next election cycle.
This week, it emerged that the newly appointed head of America’s NPR (National Public Radio) hates the US Constitution. Speaking in 2021, she described the First Amendment which safeguards free speech as “a challenge.”
How could it be that the head of America’s public broadcasting service, established by an act of Congress, has such contempt for the US Constitution?
In her previous role running Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, Katherine Maher rejected a “free and open internet” as a guiding principle. Such principles are, in her words, a “white male Westernized construct,” according to reports.
Katherine Maher, reports say, support efforts to censor opinions that do not conform with her leftist world view. She spoke of the truth as being “a distraction”.
Sadly, Katherine Maher is not a one off. She is fairly typical of the sort of people now running many of America’s institutions, HR departments, government agencies and universities.
Ms Maher’s social media posts might read like parody. There is nothing funny about the way that people with Ms Maher’s outlook and opinions are subverting America’s Founding principles, and replacing them with a grim leftist dogma that risks destroying American and the West.
Conservatives need to push back, but how?
Until now, many conservatives have been better at identifying the problem than at tackling it.
To defeat DEI, we need to pass laws, reform institutions, appoint the right people and set the right incentives. Most of all, however, we need to counter bad ideas with good ideas.
States can take a lead in the fight back. Here in Mississippi, for example, there was a successful campaign two years ago for a bill to combat Critical Race Theory. The new law goes some way to addressing the issue, but not far enough.
If we are serious about restricting DEI dogma, we need to ensure that your tax dollars cannot be spent promoting this divisive ideology.
Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, has shown that states can take the lead against DEI, signing an Executive Order, restricting the use of public money for DEI programs. State leaders in Oklahoma, Utah and Texas have also done something similar. We need to see similar action here in Mississippi.
Did you know that many public universities use your tax dollars to promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs?
One of our leading public universities here in Mississippi has an “institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion plan” governing every aspect of campus life. DEI shapes not only university admissions, administration and faculty hiring, but what young people are taught, with the development of an academic equity scorecard.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. That is why conservatives need to expose how many of your tax dollars are being spent to DEI programs.
Instead of more DEI hires, the University of Florida recently decided to eliminate all DEI employee positions. Last month, the University of Texas at Austin fired dozens of employees who used to work in diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Every state should aim for something similar.
The best way to defeat bad ideas is with good ideas. Teaching young people the following truths about America will give them immunity against the ‘woke’ mind virus.
- America is built on liberty. This country got started because people living in 13 former British colonies had had enough of being bossed about by a British king.
- The US Constitution is the best system of government in the world. America might only be 240-something years old, but the US Constitution is now the oldest written Constitution in the world.
- America is a force for good. On three occasions – World War I, World War II and the Cold War - the United States intervened to save the free world.
- Americans are inventive. From the first flight to the advent of the iphone, there is one country that has proved extraordinarily inventive: the USA.
- Judeo-Christian ideals have shaped America.
- A generation ago, the conservative movement focused on things like tax cuts and red tape reduction. Those things remain essential, but we also need to ensure that we are promoting America’s Founding principles.
This is a fight that we can win. One day we will look back and think it absurd that someone with Katherine Maher’s outlook could be put in charge of producing public service broadcasting content. But there is a great deal that we need to do right now in order to get there!
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Beware of politicians who want to ban things.
What would you most like to see Mississippi’s elected lawmakers do during the current legislative session?
Action to eliminate the reams of red tape holding our state back, maybe? Further tax cuts, perhaps? With so many other southern states moving ahead with school choice, you might wish that our lawmakers would do something similar.
I doubt that a bill to ban “squatted” trucks is your top priority. Yet, that is precisely what one bill in our state legislature aims to do.
I’m not about to invest a lot of effort into opposing this bill, but I do think we should be wary of politicians in the business of banning things.
Typically, politicians resort to banning things when they don’t have any other ideas. The impulse to ban things is driven by their search for validation and purpose.
Those in favor of a ban on “squatted” trucks are quick to tell us that action is urgent given how dangerous these trucks are. I can think of a lot of things that could be deemed dangerous.
Do conservatives really want to get into the business of banning things because they are dangerous? Once you start, where do you stop? If trucks are to be banned for being dangerous, wait ‘til you hear what progressives have to say about guns.
Under this proposed law, anyone caught driving a vehicle whose front ends are raised more than four inches above the height of the rear fender faces a $100 fine. Will police officers pull people over to measure their fenders? Should the guy with a truck raised a mere 3 inches expect to get pulled over every time?
As the parent of a teenager, I’ve discovered how adding a young person to your insurance policy can make your premiums soar. This is because the insurance system is good at assessing risk. Higher risk = higher premiums.
If squatted trucks really were the danger that the detractors claim, surely it would be reflected in raised insurance premiums to the point where they became prohibitively expensive.
In a free society, there must be an overwhelmingly good reason to use the state’s monopoly of force to restrict something. It is not enough to ban something because we disapprove of it. Or. as I fear, disapprove of the people that drive “squatted” trucks.
Once politicians form the habit of seeking out things to ban for the benefit of the rest of us, they won’t stop. Next will come a ban on certain types of vapes. Or, as in California, certain food additives and Skittles. If they can ban one type of truck, why not another?
If you want to see where relentless banning leads, take a look at my own native Britain. Despite having had notionally conservative governments, politicians across the pond have relentlessly banned things from certain breeds of dog to plastic drinking straws. From the ability to use email lists for marketing to self-defense pepper spray. From disposable cutlery and gas water heaters to the internal combustion engine (from 2035).
On their own, none of these restrictions have proved to be a catastrophe (although the ban on internal combustion cars, once it comes into force, may yet prove to be). Collectively, however, the blizzard of bans has been devastating by infantilizing British society.
Treated like children, more and more people behave like children. Denied responsibility, society grows irresponsible. Britain today feels utterly demoralized as a consequence. This is what happens when you put politicians in charge of deciding what’s best for everyone else.
Banning tilted trucks won’t be the end of the world for Mississippi. It will be the end of a little bit more liberty.
The impulse to ban things, I believe, comes from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.” Let’s leave Mississippi truck drivers alone.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.