Walmart takes a lot of heat for its alleged effects on wages, employment, labor standards, and community quality-of-life. In research we’ve worked on over the last few years, my co-authors and I have examined the merits of these claims and have found that a lot of this heat is undeserved. Rigorous empirical research shows that Walmart creates jobs and lowers prices. Research also shows that Walmart does not lead kill small businesses (though this claim has been brought into question) or generally reduce “quality of life” within a community.

One area in which Walmart should be viewed with skepticism, however, is their pursuit of subsidies from the local governments with which they do business. While these subsidies and tax breaks allegedly create jobs and tax revenue, they reward political savvy rather than productivity. This tilts the economic playing field in favor of large corporations with armies of lawyers and against small entrepreneurs.

While working on some Walmart-related research last summer, I was given an article about a multi-million dollar package of tax breaks and subsidies given to Walmart to develop a distribution center in Lewiston, Maine. According to the Walmart Subsidy Watch website (www.walmartsubsidywatch.org, maintained by the organization Good Jobs First), the package included millions of dollars in tax increment financing incentives, over three hundred thousand dollars worth of free land, and $2.7 million in infrastructure improvements. While one can debate the various merits and demerits of tax increment financing, free land and infrastructure amount to giveaways that reduce Walmart’s costs of doing business at the expense of the company’s competitors.

These policies distort economic activity and create waste, on net, but they are likely to remain popular among local governments competing to “create jobs” and attract revenue-producing benefits. For politicians, large installations like Walmart Distribution Centers, automobile factories, and pro sports franchises are attractive because they are very large, very visible, and very easy to take credit for. It might also be easier to collect taxes from a single large taxpayer than from innumerable smaller firms, but this remains an open question.

Subsidies do not create wealth. They transfer wealth from one entity to another—in the case mentioned here, these subsidies transfer wealth from the taxpayers of Maine to stockholders of the world’s largest corporation. Further, the possibility of subsidy gives companies incentives to direct resources away from their core business—providing a wide selection of goods at low prices, in Walmart’s case—and toward unproductive “rent-seeking,” which is the term economists and political scientists use to describe the hunt for special privileges from the government. Subsidies create large, easy-to-identify changes in the distribution of economic activity, but they do not create net new economic activity. We would all be better off if governments let us keep our money instead of taking it and giving it to other people.

Across the country, politicians are responding to the inability of a population devastated by government-induced recession to support governments’ spending at levels they have grown accustomed to by threatening the closure of schools, firehouses, and other high-profile, highly-valued government “services.” I have opined elsewhere on the reasons that such high-profile programs—rather than the thousands of highly-paid bureaucrats whose functions are absolutely inessential—are identified first for cutting as the means to cut spending. Suffice it to repeat that such extortion has worked before and politicians can only hope it will continue to allow them to line their pockets at the expense of people who actually earn their money.

Tomorrow California is holding a special election with various propositions on the ballot promising budget fixes “for the schools.” Like every tax and borrowing provision before them, these tax increases won’t fix the schools. In fact, despite widely disparate policy recommendations, virtually every non-government education researcher, from Stanford University to the Heritage Foundation, agrees that money is not the problem: in sum, government education is Just Plain Dysfunctional.

So why does the idea of a “public school” education, so clearly oxymoronic, remain such a sacred cow? Every argument used throughout history for the establishment of State-sponsored education has been rooted in ideology: the utopian ideal of creating the good citizen, from Francis Bacon:

And it is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men gentle, generous, malleable and pliant to government; whereas, ignorance makes them churlish, thwart, and mutinous.

To Karl Marx:

The communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the characteristic of that intervention and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

None, historically, was based in an actual or perceived lack of educational opportunities in the absence of government-provided schools. Yet today it is widely assumed that if the government didn’t provide schools the poor wouldn’t have any, and that government schools are bad because they don’t have enough money.

In fact, government spending on K–12 public education in America is at an all-time high. The national average current expenditure per student is around $10,418. Real spending per student has increased by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, test scores and graduation rates have remained low and flat, and the gap between whites and non-whites has remained wide and essentially unchanged.

If the government can’t teach reading and writing and ‘rithmetic for $10,000 per year per student, why would anyone want them to have more? Isn’t it time to just cut off government funding of education, eliminate the taxes supposedly collected for education altogether, and let the resources freed up be deployed far more effectively and creatively? Teachers and/or parents could privatize their schools (see our “Can Teachers Own their Own Schools?”), and the market and private associations could and would otherwise create myriad alternatives just as phone companies freed from the Ma Bell monopoly have put a cell phone with functionality unimaginable 20 years ago into the hands of every 13 year old in the country.

As Adam Smith knew, freed from a public school monopoly, people “would soon find better teachers for themselves than any the state could find for them.”

Children, especially you, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, we will have no more interrupting, bullying or other disruptive behavior!

Now boys and girls, are you all paying attention? Here is Emmy Award-winner “Uncle Jay” (Jay Gilbert) to explain your gargantuan, reckless, and predatory government spending and deficit habits:

Your homework assignment is to read the following book, submit a review of it for publication in your local newspaper, and then write on the blackboard 10,000 times, “No one should tolerate my childish, nonsensical and plunderous behavior any longer.”

Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity, by Robert Higgs

Here is Independent Institute Research Fellow Stephen P. Halbrook as the keynote speaker before an audience of 1,000 people at the Fourth Annual Right to Keep and Bear Arms Rally that was held on April 21st in the State Capitol Building of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, Penn. Dr. Halbrook is the author of our bestselling book, The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms, that has formed the basis for the Second Amendment Book Bomb.

The Obama administration blunders onward in its “progressive” (i.e., authoritarian) absurdities. According to CBS News, now the FDA has sent a letter to General Mills, the makers of Cheerios, warning them to stop including health claims in their advertising not because they are false, but because such claims make Cheerios a “drug” which “may not be legally marketed with the above claims in the United States without an approved new drug application.”

Current boxes of Cheerios are touting what the company calls exciting news—the cereal’s ability to help lower cholesterol 10 percent in one month. . . . According to a letter from the FDA General Mills’ advertising violates the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. The agency said claims that Cheerios ingredients can lower cholesterol within a certain amount of time, all while providing cancer-fighting and heart-healthy benefits, essentially makes Cheerios “a drug” by their definition. . . . The FDA gave General Mills 15 days to explain how it will correct the statements on Cheerios boxes. . . . In a statement issued Tuesday, General Mills said this dispute is over language, not science. The company pointed out that the FDA’a complaint doesn’t actually question whether Cheerios can help lower cholesterol levels—it only talks about how the health benefits are advertised.

For an extensive critical analysis of the enormous harms from and alternatives to the FDA food and drug bureaucracy and police, see our website FDAReview.org.

This is wonderful! The Republicans, in trying to ward off the Democrats’ investigations of Bush and the Republicans for torture-related war crimes, are threatening retaliation. To be consistent, say the Republicans, there must be investigations of the Clinton-era “renditioning” program, Democrats who knew of the torture under Bush, even Eric Holder himself.

Will the Democrats back down? Probably, since they know they are complicit in Bush’s war crimes and other criminality, past and present. But I say: Convene the war crime tribunals, enough for the whole bunch,* and don’t stop at torture and renditioning — conducting aggressive wars and occupations, whether it was Bush, Clinton or anyone else, is also a war crime.

* In reality, I am reluctant to see even politicians prosecuted by government. But if anyone should ever be investigated and prosecuted by the state, it is those politicians who knowingly violate individual rights, constitutional safeguards and international law, especially the ones who do so at the level to which we are all now accustomed.

This is some rather principled and thoughtful commentary. I hope to see much more like this on Fox.

Here is the Onion News Network’s hilarious and incisive, satirical report on the “U.S. Army’s Third Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter to War’ Day”.

And some good news out of Iraq. U.S. military commanders have announced that the Third Annual “Bring Your Daughter to War” Day was a great success. . . . Over 15,000 daughters got to see firsthand what goes into fighting a war. . . . Conceived as a way to open young women’s eyes to opportunities in the Armed Forces, “Bring Your Daughter to War” Day also provides a way for girls to see their parents once a year. . . . Organizers called this year’s event the most successful one so far. Only four girls were killed, down from a dozen last year, for the most accident-free on record.

Army Holds Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter To War’ Day

9/11 and terrorism. In a new video, the Republicans focus on Obama’s closing of Guantanamo (one of his very few semi-decent acts) as the epitome of what distinguishes the two parties.

Ho hum. If I actually believed Republican propaganda, I’d have to favor the Democrats. I suppose the reverse is also true: The Dems always focus on something relatively irrelevant or even good being done by Republicans as the reason they can’t be supported.

Could House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be lying once again?

The Washington Post has now reported that directly contrary to her repeated claims, a newly released intelligence memo indicates that less than a year after 9/11, Pelosi was fully briefed in 2002 about CIA torture techniques being used.

In a 10-page memo outlining an almost seven-year history of classified briefings, intelligence officials said that Pelosi and then-Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.) were the first two members of Congress ever briefed on the interrogation tactics. Then the ranking member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, respectively, Pelosi and Goss were briefed Sept. 4, 2002, one week before the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In an April 25th article in the Post, Porter Goss, who later became CIA Director, confirms that Pelosi and other congressional leaders are now lying about the matter in order to cover up their total complicity in supporting the use of torture techniques:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation’s intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s “High Value Terrorist Program,” including the development of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as “waterboarding” were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

• The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
• We understood what the CIA was doing.
• We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
• We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
• On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed “memorandums for the record” suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately—to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president’s national security adviser—and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

In addition, the Post reported in December 2007 that:

[L]eaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees had been briefed in the fall of 2002 about waterboarding—which simulates drowning—and other techniques, and that no congressional leaders protested its use. At the time Pelosi said she was not told that waterboarding was being used, a position she stood by repeatedly last month when the Bush-era Justice Department legal documents justifying the interrogation tactics were released by Attorney General Eric Holder.

The new memo shows that intelligence officials were willing to share the information about waterboarding with only a sharply closed group of people. Three years after the initial Pelosi-Goss briefing, Bush officials still limited interrogation technique briefings to just the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the so-called Gang of Four in the intelligence world.

In October 2005, CIA officials began briefing other congressional leaders with oversight of the intelligence community, including top appropriators who provided the agency its annual funding. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam and an opponent of torture techniques, was also read into the program at that time even though he did not hold a special committee position overseeing the intelligence community.

A bipartisan collection of lawmakers have criticized the practice of limiting information to just the “Gang of Four”, who were expressly forbidden from talking about the information from other colleagues, including fellow members of the intelligence committees.

Here is Pelosi trying to spin the matter at her April 24th news conference, “We were not! I repeat not told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.”