ISSUES FOR ARIZONA IN 1998

By John A. Buttrick

Key issues facing Arizonans in this 1998 election season

When it comes to crime, Republican and Democrat politicians continue to offer recycled versions of the same failed policies of the past. I offer the five-step Libertarian program we call "Operation Safe Streets." The plan is as follows:

Step 1. Protect victims' rights with full monetary restitution and complete involvement of the victims in the criminal justice process. This means that no plea bargains can be made with criminals without the consent of the victim.

Step 2. End prohibition. Drug prohibition does more to make Americans unsafe than any other factor. Just as happened during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and '30s, we have drive-by shootings and gang activity causing higher homicide rates and other violent crime in this country. This is the result of the sky-high drug prices caused by the criminalization statutes. The bottom line? By ending drug prohibition, we would double the resources available for crime prevention and significantly reduce the number of violent criminals that walk in your neighborhood.

Step 3. Get tough on real crime. This means no parole (except in extraordinary circumstances) for violent criminals. Right now, after serving 85% of their sentence, violent criminals can get out on parole. I would end that practice and make room in jail for those criminals by ending drug prohibition.

Step 4. Protect the right to self-defense. Private ownership of firearms is part of the solution to America's crime epidemic, not part of the problem. In Arizona, we have not only Second Amendment protection, but the protection of Article II, Section 26 of the Arizona Constitution, which preserves your right to self-defense. This should never be infringed. The evidence shows that self-defense with guns is the safest response to violent crime. It results in fewer injuries to the defender than any other strategy.

Step 5. Address the root causes of crime. Any society that lets kids grow up dependent on government welfare, attending government schools that fail to teach, and entering an economy where government policy has crushed opportunity, will be a society that breeds criminals. No permanent solution to crime will be found until we address these root causes. I would increase employment opportunities by slashing taxes and government red tape. I would end the welfare system with its culture of dependence and hopelessness. Perhaps most important, I would promote low cost private alternatives to the failed government school system.

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EDUCATION

Alexis de Toqueville marveled at how literate early America was. From tycoon to stableboy, we were remarkably well educated.

That was before we turned education over to government.

Today's high school honor students rarely have the command of English that an average sixth-grader attained in 1850. The comparison is equally dismal for most other subjects. Despite quadrupling the funds spent for education since 1950 (adjusting for inflation), we are now turning out more "functional illiterates" from our high schools than ever before, and the SAT scores of our students have been falling for 30 years! What happened?

Students learn well when they value education, appreciate its cost, and have firm standards to meet. Those conditions are hardly satisfied today: The value of public education has plummeted. Many students can't imagine how education will benefit them. The costs of public education are invisible to the student. And students are held to this strict standard: "Whatever you do is just wonderful!"

These problems will turn around almost overnight if we do just one thing: eliminate the government operation and oversight of education.

We must separate school and state, and apply the same free market principles that have always kept the quality up and the price down for products and services in the private sector. Parents should pay directly for their children's education, and choose the schools they will attend. That means completely open enrollment. Because parents care deeply about their children's futures, they will carefully choose the best schools they can afford (seeking financial aid if necessary), and will monitor the quality of education their children receive. Private charities will provide scholarships for needy children.

And students will begin really learning again.

SCHOOL CHOICE

Charter Schools

School Vouchers

There is a real chance that a voucher program could be passed in the next legislative session. If so, you will need me in there to make sure that a measure intended to increase parental choice doesn't turn out to turn even more control over to the state!

The only sure route to fundamental, lasting educational reform is complete privitization of our schools, with no government involvement or funding.

Education Tax Credits

Home Schooling

That freedom is under attack, however. At this writing (February, 1998), there is a bill circulating in the Arizona House (HB2471) that would, if enacted, require homeschooling parents to conform to highly restrictive administrative and reporting regulations, and subject them to very severe penalties for such trivial infractions as deviating from scheduled hours of instruction!

The performance, nationwide, of children who have been schooled at home so far surpasses that of their public school counterparts that one would think such proven success would stop any further attempts to dismantle the most cost-effective method of providing high-quality education in America. Not so. The education establishment is jealous of its power.

Constant, unrelenting pressure must be exerted within the Arizona Legislature to preserve and encourage the home education of Arizona's children -- including broadly flexible cooperative arrangements among parents to share the load and pool their talents, hire tutors and lecturers, and make the whole world a school for their children. And I am just the one to do that job.

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ECONOMIC GROWTH

Medieval serfs labored one day a week for their masters. In return, they got limited protection from marauding bandits. It was a lousy deal, but they were given little choice in the matter.

Today, the average American works more than three days a week for his master, Government. Real progress, eh?

Human creativity, initiative, and drive are incredibly powerful forces for economic growth. So powerful, in fact, that in spite of the huge drain on our resources imposed by insatiable government, even the poor today live lives of luxury compared to those of the medieval serfs just mentioned. Just imagine what wealth we would enjoy if all the money skimmed off by government had been invested in developing new products and services (and countless good jobs providing them) instead!

The key to economic growth everywhere lies in two simple changes: (1) cut taxes, and (2) eliminate regulation.

Cutting taxes doesn't mean doing without the goods and services we have been getting from our various levels of government; it just means restricting government to only those jobs that require force or the threat of force (such as law enforcement and our judicial system). For everything else, it's just a matter of choosing to get it elsewhere -- either from private companies competing to provide such services better and cheaper than their competitors (and certainly better and cheaper than government ever could), or through voluntary cooperation with our neighbors.

Eliminating regulation doesn't mean allowing people to cheat, rob, or otherwise injure one another without restriction. It just means relying on general laws prohibiting the intentional or reckless harming or defrauding of others. Justice has always required that anyone who harms another pay restitution to the victim and suffer a penalty severe enough to deter any rational person from doing such a wrong in the future. Shouldn't that be enough?

For half a century now, however, America has taken a different path. We have almost given up on the idea of restitution, and we have undermined the penalties for criminal behavior by making excuses for criminals who all seem to suffer from some past unhappiness that caused them to be attracted to crime. But we are merciless when it comes to our attempts to prevent crime, and we have adopted a new strategy: restricting the ability people have to harm or defraud one another! We pass countless laws and bureaucratic regulations detailing all the specific ways we can imagine that one person might wrong another, and then eliminate entire classes of otherwise harmless activities that could be diverted to harmful purposes. And, as if that weren't enough, we do the same for activities that offer opportunities for us to harm ourselves!

This approach flies in the face of an obvious reality: unless we put everybody in solitary confinement, there will always be the potential for some to harm others. And it would take something as radical as putting everyone in straitjackets to prevent us from ever harming ourselves! Now, it shouldn't be too hard to see that imprisonment and immobilization of the whole population would be vastly more harmful to us than any amount of damage sustained by criminal activity -- particularly if we are careful to prosecute and punish criminals for their wrongdoing and require that they compensate their victims -- thereby making crime an unattractive option and minimizing the net harm suffered by the victims of crime.

The point of this little digression on crime is that the regulation of liberty is the wrong way to prevent harm, and it is much more costly to society than is the harm it tries to prevent. Regulations on business are intended to protect consumers and the community, but they wind up costing an obscene amount in lost opportunities, compliance with red tape, higher prices and fewer jobs.

For the past decade or so, states and cities have attempted to induce economic growth by offering tax breaks to companies moving into their jurisdictions, hoping that the economic activity generated by those companies will stimulate the economy more than enough to offset the forgiven tax revenues. This is grossly unfair to everyone else who is paying unreduced taxes -- including some who will have to compete with the newcomers for business!

Imagine, on the other hand, what would happen if taxes and regulations were reduced across the board. New companies and workers would be attracted to the area, but that's just the beginning. More importantly, everyone would have more money to spend, and companies could drop their prices because of their much lower costs -- so a dollar would go a lot farther than before, too. When everyone has more money, and a dollar buys more than it did before, what you have is a huge economic boom! There's more investment in new economic activity, more jobs, higher wages, cheaper and better products, and the boom just grows and grows.

That's the economic future we want for Arizona.

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IMMIGRATION

We don't have an immigration problem. We have a welfare problem and a growing elections problem. Immigrants, legal or not, who come here to work hard and be self-sufficient are good for the economy. Their industry and ambition are moral beacons for the rest of us to follow. Those, however, who come here not to work, but only to live on government benefits, drain America both economically and morally. Worse, lax government policies are now sometimes allowing illegal aliens to vote. The solution is not immigration control, but election reform and the wholesale dismantling of the welfare state.