If you watch any of the cable news shows you may have seen Naomi Klein on them recently, discussing her book The Shock Doctrine. In it she makes the claim that Milton Friedman was essentially an enabler of dictators around the world and that he and his followers fomented crises in order to deregulate markets and thereby plunder the wealth of these nations. Anyone who has read Friedman knows this is ridiculous, but Klein has become a celebrity on the statist circuit for telling those audiences what they want to hear.

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The Coalition on Housing and Homelessness in Ohio (COHHIO) has been a big supporter of the push to ban short-term loans, aka payday lending. There’s nothing wrong with individuals banding together as an organization to lobby government. That’s the essence of the First Amendment. But is it proper for taxpayer-supported organizations to do so? Or, to put it another way, should organizations to which you, as a taxpayer, are forced to hand over your money be pursuing a political agenda?

COHHIO receives a significant portion of its funding from government grants. Now, according to its tax forms (available if you are a member of Guidestar), it spent almost $500,000 in 2006 on lobbying. That’s more than it spent on “training and technical assistance” to help the homeless. Now, I’m sure there are requirements that the money it gets from the government is kept separate from its lobbying money and that COHHIO has the proper firewalls between funding sources. I’m not accusing them of breaking any laws. I’m concerned about the wider issues here. The government funds, at the very minimum, support the overhead and salary of COHHIO officials. Without these funds, COHHIO would have a difficult time doing its work, whether that is lobbying or providing “training and technical assistance” on homelessness issues.

You have no choice but to support COHHIO’s work. Even if you disagree with them, they get your money. Is that right? Is it right that a group gets taxpayer dollars and that this group may be working against your interests before the General Assembly?

Marc Kilmer keeps his eye on the pea with this Buckeye Institute Viewpoint , disparaging the earned-income-only income tax for school districts. The very thing that was sought to be achieved, exempting retired people from paying for school districts, is the thing that Kilmer attacks:

Politicians need to be honest and levy taxes so that voters can truly appreciate the cost of the taxes against the benefits received by new spending. If a new school is truly needed, taxpayers should be willing to bear the cost. If it is not, however, then politicians should not be trying to trick voters into approving it by shifting the cost to only a small segment of school district taxpayers.

The difference between taxes and user fees is one of the key components of transparency, the character of knowing what your government is doing. When government officials are able to shift dollars from one character of government activity to another without structure, rhyme or reason, voters cannot follow what their government is doing.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an insightful op-ed by John Merrow, the president of Learning Matters, regarding the recent decision by New York lawmakers to ban the use of student performance data in granting tenure to teachers.

State and city teacher unions lobbied the state legislature, and last month Albany gave in to the pressure. Today, the law reads, “The teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data.”

Celebrating the victory, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said, “There is no independent or conclusive research that shows you can accurately measure the impact of an individual teacher on a student’s academic achievement.”

Independent analysts disagree. Eric Hanushek, who specializes in the economics of education at Stanford University, told me recently that “It is very clear from the research into variations in teacher quality that such information would be useful.” Calling this “very bad public policy,” Prof. Hanushek added dryly, “I guess only friendships and politics count - just what the unions have always railed against.”

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In following the debate about payday lending before the Senate Finance Committee this week, particularly the effort of Sen. Jeff Jacobson (R., Dayton) to impugn the motives of our scholar witness through innuendo and insinuation, I am reminded of what our friend Larry Reed of the Mackinac Center wrote in Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy:

Too often today, policymakers give no thought whatsoever to the general state of liberty when they craft new policies. If it feels good or sounds good or gets them elected, they just do it. Anyone along the way who might raise liberty-based objections is ridiculed or ignored.