If you don’t visit Freedom Pub and the Heartlander digital magazine every day, you’re missing out on some of the best news and commentary on liberty and free markets you can find. But worry not, freedom lovers! Heartland Weekly is here for you every Monday with a highlight show. Subscribe to the email today, and read this week’s edition below.
If Teachers Unions Are So Great, Why Aren’t Our Schools?
Teresa Mull, American Spectator
The week of August 20 was National Employee Freedom Week, a time to celebrate our nation’s 28 right-to-work states, lament over the 22 non-right-to-work states, and reflect on the destruction America’s teachers unions are inflicting on our youngest and most vulnerable citizens. Government schools enroll about 90 percent of U.S. students. Despite the unions’ insistence there should be no alternative to public schools because public schools are the best thing for kids, we see American students losing ground to their international peers every year. READ MORE
Will a Quest of Judicial Collegiality Rob Some Parents of School Choice?
Robert Holland, Deseret News
Over the past two decades, many state courts have upheld all-inclusive school choice plans — Blaine amendments notwithstanding — on grounds that scholarship aid goes to parents, who make their own free choices, and not directly to religious institutions. However, Blaine continues to be an impediment to choice in several states, among them Colorado. If not for a footnote to a Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, it would be a pretty safe bet that Colorado’s Blaine amendment would yield to the right of parents to choose the very best schools for their children, with Blaine just blessedly fading into irrelevance. READ MORE
How Corporate Tax Reform Can Grow The Economy, Restore Jobs And Lift Wages
Peter Ferrara, Investor’s Business Daily
President Trump proposes a one-time corporate tax rate of 10 percent on foreign earnings now held abroad if reinvested in the U.S. Based on its Taxes and Growth model of the U.S. economy, the Tax Foundation estimates that such a tax reform plan would increase real GDP by over nine percent and real wages by eight percent, while creating at least 2 million new, permanent, full-time jobs. The real beneficiaries of such tax reform would be blue collar workers and the middle class, with millions more new jobs and the return of rising wages. READ MORE
Featured Podcast: Clark Packard: Curbing Agricultural Subsidies To Open International Markets
Clark Packard, policy analyst with the R Street Institute, explains that free trade is good for farmers, but current American agricultural policy discourages that by doling out billions in annual subsidies. This grossly distorts farm markets and results in many foreign markets being closed to American farm and ranch products. Heartland Institute Research Fellow H. Sterling Burnett and Packard talk about how eliminating anti-free-trade farm policies would create an additional one million jobs in the U.S. every year. LISTEN TO MORE
Free Markets, Not Government, Improve Race Relations
Richard Ebeling, Freedom Pub
Today’s political polarization, as captured in the mainstream news media, appears to be intensifying with even acts of destructive violence taking place on the streets and campuses of American cities. At the same time, pictures out of Houston during and following Hurricane Harvey show empathetic assistance and cooperation between people and groups that supposedly are in heated contention with each other. How do we reconcile this? Like all things, the free market seems to have the answer. READ MORE
Teachers Union Likens Giving People Choice to a Bomb
Teresa Mull, School Choice Weekly
Last week, School Choice Weekly reported on Illinois’ approval of a tax-credit scholarship program, finally bringing some much-needed school choice to the state. This week, like clockwork, we have the mass hysteria of the Chicago Teachers Union, which knows its days are numbered. They refer to a “ticking time bomb,” but if that’s the case then they must have a direct supplier, because the union cost taxpayers $800,000 in legal fees alone just to reach a contract with Chicago Public Schools last year. READ MORE
Federal Judge Blocks Wisconsin County’s ‘Pokémon Go’ Park Ordinance
Budget & Tax News
An ordinance, approved by the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors in February, requires developers of augmented-reality (AR) mobile phone games, such as Niantic’s “Pokémon Go,” to pay a $1,000 permit fee and apply for government permission to allow their apps to function in county parks during certain hours. A federal judge, however, had blocked this “Pokémon Hunting Permit” and brought America one of the strangest regulatory stories of the summer. READ MORE
Yet Another Renewable Energy Boondoggle
Paul Driessen, CFACT
Wilkinson Solar has filed papers requesting permits for a 74-megawatt solar electricity facility about 35 miles east of Greenville, NC. If approved, 288,120 solar panels would blanket 600 acres (0.94 square miles) of now scenic, serene farmland next door to the Terra Ceia Christian School near Morehead City. The company wants to catch the solar wave, and make a lot of money under “net metering” policies that require payment for electricity added to the grid, whenever it is generated and regardless of whether the electricity is needed at the time. READ MORE
Bonus Podcast: Edward Hudgins: Don’t Fight the Future of Labor
Research fellow Jesse Hathaway talks with Heartland Institute Director of Research Edward Hudgins about the fantastic future of the workplace. Artificial intelligence and robots will be a big part of our future, but will not replace people, Hudgin says. They will be our companions, allowing people to make better, more accurate choices. As technology replaces manual labor, he says, workers will need better education, but there will always be a place for those who wish to work with their hands, if they so choose. The future is bright, Hudgin says, but only if we use free-market principles to guide us through the temporary uncertainty. LISTEN TO MORE
Little Incentive for Police to Act Within the Law
David D’Amato, The Hill
In the United States today, government actors are the foremost violators of the Enlightenment conception of the rule of law, under which everyone, regardless of social position, gender, race, or other categories, is entitled to equal protection. And while equality before the law is necessary, even that much is not sufficient. The law itself, its content, must also conform to certain standards. It must safeguard certain inviolable individual rights. READ MORE
Yes, Stealing Intellectual Property Is Stealing
Seton Motley, RedState
One of the ongoing ridiculous myths that exists on the Left – and, even more maddeningly, with some on the alleged Right – is that stealing intellectual property is not stealing. In this warped worldview, entering a Best Buy and stealing a DVD movie – is bad. Downloading-without-paying-for the exact same movie – is somehow less bad. It is, in fact, not bad at all. That’s absurd. READ MORE
Talk With Heartland Experts!
You are cordially invited to participate in an exclusive monthly conference call for supporters who give $250 or more to The Heartland Institute. The first Wednesday of each month we will host a 20- to 30-minute call with a short presentation by one or more of Heartland’s senior staff.
Please RSVP to Gwendalyn Carver at 312/377-4000 or [email protected]. You will receive dial-in information upon confirmation of your participation. DONATE HERE
Help Us Stop Wikipedia’s Lies!
Have you visited Heartland’s Wikipedia page recently? The good news is that it is more complete than it was just a couple months ago, after leftists took it over and trashed it. Most of the new information is accurate and unbiased. But the lies and libel about our positions on smoking and climate change remain. Other conservative and free-market sites suffer, too. Wikipedia refuses to make many of the changes we request and deletes and reverses the changes made by others. We need your help! READ MORE