The first major economic policy issue of the 2013 Albuquerque Mayoral election has been broached by candidate Pete Dinelli. According to media reports, Dinelli wants to spend $300 million to expand the Sunport. I’m almost thinking that, based on Dinelli’s own statements, he’s not really serious about the issue as he states in the same article “Construction wouldn’t begin until a major air-related company agreed to expand operations in Albuquerque.”

OK. Well, who are these air-related companies that are expanding? Is anybody seriously looking at building some kind of hub in Albuquerque? If they were, that could be a real boon for the area economy and expanding the airport might make sense, but UPS and FEDEX are struggling right now due to the poor economy. And, of course, Frontier Airlines has announced that it will be pulling out of the Sunport.

I think the Sunport is one of the best things any government in New Mexico does. It is beautiful (as airports go) and functional. I’d love to have more direct flights and more international flights in and out of the airport. You know how we do that? We grow not only the local, but the state economy as a whole. Unfortunately, local governments have limited capacity to change the bedrock economic and educational policies that the Legislature in Santa Fe deals with.

So, perhaps Dinelli is running for the wrong office? He should go to the Legislature and advocate for Right to Work, reduced regulations, tax reform, and an education system that works….then we’ll have a reason to expand the Sunport.

The Institute for Justice is one of America’s pre-eminent freedom organizations. Tim Keller visited New Mexico to help the Rio Grande Foundation celebrate Friedman’s legacy at a luncheon event in Albuquerque on July 31, 2013. Video of Friedman’s talk is below:

Several photos of the celebration and our radio discussion with Bob Clark of 770 KKOB AM can be found below:

Classic Milton Friedman defending capitalism on Phil Donahue’s show (trust me kids, he was almost as big as Oprah back in the day):

And, since he’s not here to defend himself, I have to defend Friedman against the idea that maximizing shareholder value as the proper role of business is “the dumbest idea in the world.”

For starters, the author bases his case around the idea that Friedman said that businesses should “only maximize shareholder value.” Based on my reading of Friedman on the issue, that is an inaccurate statement.

Friedman was merely saying that maximizing shareholder value is the primary social responsibility of any publicly-owned business. In other words, businesses already do a great deal of good by producing products and services desired by their customers. But that doesn’t mean that businesses can’t do other good in the community as well if that doesn’t negatively impact shareholders. Take Whole Foods for example. The head of the company, John Mackey, is a libertarian. His company engages in what could only be described as a great deal of “community improvement” and public service.

Is that wrong according to Friedman’s logic? He’s not here to say, but I don’t think so. Clearly, being a good corporate citizen is also good business in most instances. It would seem to me that this adds to rather than detracting from the company’s bottom line. So, far from being the “world’s dumbest idea,” Friedman was merely defending businesses as already helping their customers and being socially responsible. Doing additional work beyond the “bottom line” isn’t a bad thing as long as it is in line with shareholder interests.

I found John Fleck’s story on a San Acacia, NM, farmer in today’s Albuquerque Journal to be interesting and frustrating at the same time. The farmer does his job “against the odds” which is portrayed at least sympathetically. Of course, one need to look no further than last year’s Super Bowl to find evidence of the hero-farmer (a compelling commercial nonetheless).

But life is not supposed to be that tough. It is the market telling farmers (as it has for generations) on marginal land using less-than-optimal practices to do something else because the activity can be done better elsewhere. This is better for the environment, thus undercutting the whole “buy local” concept as well which actually hurts the environment.

A buggy whip salesman would be laughed at for stubbornly refusing to take up another career, but a farmer is encouraged to continue to struggle against the elements and economic reality. Oh, and then we throw massive subsidies at them (including $36 million sent to dead people) and other government policies make it exceedingly difficult for poor farmers in Africa and Central America to raise their living standards by exporting agricultural products to the USA.

Among the issues that we have been monitoring regularly in this space is reciprocity for lawyers. Good news has come in the form of the Association of Corporate Counsel which recently sent a letter to the New Mexico Supreme Court.

The letter urged a relaxation of rules for out-of-state attorneys and stated in part, “Requiring experienced lawyers from other states to take the bar exam in order to practice in New Mexico privileges the parochial interests of local lawyers, rather than those of the clients they ostensibly serve,” ACC vice president and chief legal strategist Amar D. Sarwal said in a news release about the filing.

Simply put, this is a “free trade” issue. As the ACC letter states, “client . . . demand national, regional, and other transboundary access to legal services.” In other words, there is a need for attorneys from other states to practice in New Mexico that is not being filled. New Mexico’s Supreme Court, influenced by attorneys who enjoy protectionist policies, are keeping jobs and economic development out of our state for their own selfish purposes. In other words, “business as usual” for New Mexico’s political elites.

New Mexico state Sen. Griggs had a very good column in Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal on the stonewalling of federal Bureau of Land Management on mineral leasing in southern New Mexico. It is no surprise that BLM is not being a good steward of New Mexico’s lands. After all, what incentive do they have to excel?

I have written a fair amount recently about the all-important issue of restoring federal lands to state control. Griggs is absolutely correct that the BLM’s policies are costing New Mexico millions of dollars in annual revenues and job creation, not to mention the $26 million in royalties that the Obama Administration withheld from New Mexico this year.

Hopefully Griggs will actively work to persuade Gov. Martinez and his fellow legislators that New Mexico shouldn’t sit back and let the Feds mismanage our lands anymore and that legislation to that effect is needed.

The chart below says it all:

The Albuquerque Journal’s nationally-syndicated parenting columnist is in trouble. The problem, according to the paper, is that Kentucky’s Attorney General wants him to stop offering advice in his columns because he’s not licensed in Kentucky. They also say that the advice column amounts to provision of “mental health services.”

The guy has been writing columns since 1976, but apparently the ever-vigilant folks in Kentucky just decided that the column is a problem. This is just one specific illustration of the very serious problems associate with professional licensing laws and why RGF is hosting an event on Wednesday, July 31, discussing the issue of professional licensing in order to celebrate Milton Friedman Day.

The speaker comes to us from the public interest law firm, Institute for Justice, which sued North Carolina in a very similar situation to defend a blogger who was offering dietary advice without a state license.

I don’t know if “Dear Abby” or Ann Landers are/were under attack for their advice or whether the Car Talk guys are licensed mechanics, but that is the nice thing about advice: you can take it or leave it.

I read an article written by a New Mexico teacher recently in the Santa Fe Reporter. The author made some interesting comparisons about standardized testing, teacher evaluation, and sports — essentially making the argument that such efforts were misguided. I gave my own take on the issue in a letter to the editor that was published in this week’s edition:

Teacher Seth Biderman related an interesting story in which he compared teacher evaluations as a tool for achieving peak performance with his experience with different coaching styles as a soccer player [School Re-Formed, July 17: “In the Flow”]. I found the comparison apt and would like to discuss my own take.

For starters, sports in this country are highly competitive (in many respects replicating the best features of a free market). Especially at the professional level, numbers are crunched and data are available on every player and coach. Pay is based strictly on merit in a very competitive and relatively transparent system. If you don’t perform, trades and firings are “part of the business.”

Contrast that with education, where competition, transparency and pay for performance are truly lacking. Who are the best teachers in New Mexico? How should we measure performance in the classroom? What should the best teachers be paid? While Biderman is confident that “nearly all teachers want to be great,” the reality is that teaching is far less transparent than sports in separating top performers from mediocre and poor ones.

Also, while competition and accurate data are lacking in education, we do know that New Mexico’s education performance is lacking. We’re certainly not the New York Yankees or Real Madrid.

I’d like to see New Mexico adopt a few ideas from sports to improve education. Competition in the form of school choice is easily the most powerful tool, but evaluations based on student improvement and pay-for-performance must be considered as well.

Paul J Gessing
Rio Grande Foundation President

Check this story out from USA Today. While the competitive nature of sports and the large purses at stake make it unlikely that golfers will not give 100% in their professional efforts, athletes are not quite the same as businesses which may or may not decide to invest in certain areas based on heavy tax burdens.

New Mexico’s corporate taxes will go down from 7.2 to 5.9% in five years and our income tax rate has fallen from 8.2 to 4.9 in recent years, but the rates on both are still zero in Texas. This is one reason why Phil should probably re-consider his California residency and why many businesses have already done so.

In Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal, Winthrop Quigley wrote a reasonably positive piece about health savings accounts. As Quigley notes:

HSAs allow you to accumulate funds while avoiding or deferring some taxes. They are used in conjunction with high-deductible health-insurance policies, which come with lower premiums than other types of health insurance.

And, while I have an HSA and wouldn’t call them particularly complicated — they are indeed a bit more complex to set up, but are simpler in terms of allowing consumers to actually understand their health care expenses — health savings accounts are one of the very best things to happen to US health care in recent years. That’s because unlike traditional health policies and government programs, they put individuals in charge of their health care spending and give them very real financial incentives to control health care costs.

In fact, such plans are “bending the health care cost-curve,” which is supposedly the point of ObamaCare:

Companies with at least half of their workers enrolled in an account-based health plan report that their per-employee costs are over $1,000 lower than companies without an account-based health plan, according to Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health.

Similarly, Aetna reported late last year that employers who switched to account-based health plans as their only plan option had saved $21.8 million per 10,000 members over the past five years. Earlier this year, Cigna published a study concluding that employers can save an average of $9,700 per employee over five years by switching to account-based health plans. This is hard evidence for “bending the cost curve” that is so elusive for the rest of our nation’s health care system.

This potential for reducing health care spending was recently confirmed when researchers at the RAND Corporation concluded that if enrollment in account-based health plans grows to represent half of all employer-sponsored insurance, U.S. health care spending could drop by $57 billion annually. If all of these people enroll in HSA plans, the annual savings would be as high as $73.6 billion.

Health savings accounts not only work for individuals who use them, but they work for the employers who provide them and for the nation as a whole which could see major costs savings in terms of health care if they are implemented in Medicaid and Medicare for example. The only problem is that as ObamaCare (inadvertently) pushes people to adopt consumer-driven plans, health care expenses will decline with Obama taking credit for the result due to ObamaCare which is the polar opposite of HSAs.

The Albquerque Journal at the behest of my favorite columnist Wintrop Quigley engaged in a bit of collectivist self-flagellation in today’s paper. Not surprisingly, given the question, the answers were all over the place. Some focused on educational attainment while others focused on the three cultures (Native, Hispano, and Anglo) that predominate. I just don’t see the point. How is it possible to gather 2 million people under any particular banner?

After all, if you are Black or Asian, are you not a New Mexican? New Mexico has among the highest dropout rates, but also the highest percentage of PHD’s. We have an inordinately large number of government workers as well. But do any of these things make one New Mexican or preclude one from being so? We do have great natural beauty in our state, but if you are not outdoorsy, are you not a New Mexican?

Anyway, coming up with any specific traits for 2 million people is pretty futile, but here’s what I’d like to see: “New Mexico is a state that uniquely embraces freedom, both economic and personal. Regardless of your ethnicity or background, whether you are a traditionalist or an innovator, New Mexico is a place where you can fulfill your personal vision as long as you don’t hinder others from achieving their goals at the same time. And, while New Mexicans care deeply for one another, they rely on the charitable impulse of their neighbors rather than the threat of force to care for each other.”

One can dream, right?

Lots of depressing news comes out about New Mexico’s economy and educational systems. We’ve certainly publicized the bad data ourselves. But we don’t do this to perform penance or because we love wallowing in despair, we do it because we want New Mexico to do better and we believe that policy reforms will create positive results. And, while we will wait for national data confirming the success of our A-F grading system’s positive results at the high school level, we do believe that properly-targeted reforms will work.

Unfortunately, according to a poll (albeit unscientific) conducted by Albuquerque Business First, 47 percent believe that “NM simply cannot make meaningful improvements to its economic standing.” Being 50th is bad, but this is downright depressing.

Needless to say, I’ve dedicated my life to proving that 47 percent wrong. I believe that the right combination of policies and incentives will inevitably work to improve New Mexico’s economic and education situations and I’ve dedicated my life’s work to that proposition. I just don’t think New Mexico’s adopted sound free market policies for much of its 100 years as a state and that gives the impression that reform can’t happen. All I can say is that I’m not going anywhere and I’m not going to stop working to prove the fatalists wrong.

Great, New Mexico taxpayers are now on the hook for another $21 million for the spaceport. The money is supposedly needed to build two visitor centers for the facility. This is on top of the $209 million the taxpayers put up to pay for the project in the first place.

RGF has been a long-time opponent of taxpayer support for the Spaceport, but we did support efforts to create liability protections for the Spaceport during the 2012 and then 2013 sessions (the protections were adopted in the 2013 session).

While we stand by both views on their merits and I still hope the taxpayers are able to see some benefit from this facility, I wonder: absent the liability protections, would Virgin Galactic just have picked up and left us alone? Would we have to fork over another $21 million (not to mention maintenance on the entire project and other potential projects like the extended runway).

In other words, should we have just helped the trial lawyers kill the project entirely when we had the chance? Comments welcome.

We have to admit that between Aragon’s comments in the article “There is no absolute assurance that taxpayers won’t at some future point be obligated to these facilities that are being financed” and the fact that the Spaceport Authority had to go to the Board of Finance, that we assumed that taxpayers could legitimately be on the hook for all or part of the $21 million. Then I received a call from Aaron Prescott with the Spaceport Authority which puts my mind at ease to a large extent:

This $20.8M loan is entirely privately sourced, with no burden on the taxpayer. It has been sought as a way to bring private money into the project for the first time, and to take advantage of historically low interest rates. We are answering Gov. Martinez’s call for private investment and public private partnership.

NMSA’s underlying statute, the Spaceport Development Act (NMSA 1978 §58-31-1 et seq.), permits NMSA to seek private loans on the condition that 1) it cannot pledge the full faith and credit of New Mexico or create a general obligation of the state, and 2) the financing package receives approval by the State Board of Finance. Our banks are fully aware of the lack of a taxpayer backstop (it will be in the loan documents), and the Board signaled its approval yesterday.

Today’s ABQ Journal coverage of the loan had an accurate quote from SBOF member Robert Aragon, but it was in the context that just because it is state law that the taxpayers won’t be obligated by our loan, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

His comments notwithstanding, NMSA fully intends to obey its own enabling legislation. The only collateral in this loan is the project being financed, i.e. buildings and land.

How much do New Mexico’s Democratic House members LOVE the unpopular law known as ObamaCare? So much that they have voted to impose the individual mandate as planned even while the Obama Administration has delayed implementation of the employer mandate for one year. In other words, you the average person should not receive the same benefit as big businesses with more than 50 employees who simply can’t be expected to comply with the health care mandate.

Needless to say, this is not a position supported by large numbers of Americans. In fact, the position advocated by Lujan and Lujan-Grisham has a “robust” 12 percent support according to new polling.

Interesting that New Mexico’s Congressional Democrats —self-appointed advocates for the little-guy — are so willing to throw the average person under the bus while supporting big business, no? It would be nice if these two — along with the rest of our delegation — supported a year-long delay in the law our outright repeal of this law which is no longer even popular with the union base of the Democratic Party which supported passage of the law in the first place.

I’ve written and blogged about the ongoing discussion of federal lands management in New Mexico and what we might do about the situation.

Then I came across an interesting news story about the federal government’s inability to manage trails in national forests. The story is based on a June 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found:

The Forest Service has more miles of trail than it has been able to maintain, resulting in a persistent maintenance backlog with a range of negative effects. In fiscal year 2012, the agency reported that it accomplished at least some maintenance on about 37 percent of its 158,000 trail miles and that about one quarter of its trail miles met the agency’s standards. The Forest Service estimated the value of its trail maintenance backlog to be $314 million in fiscal year 2012, with an additional $210 million for annual maintenance, capital improvement, and operations. Trails not maintained to quality standards have a range of negative effects, such as inhibiting trail use and harming natural resources, and deferring maintenance can add to maintenance costs.

Any chance the government as currently organized will solve the problem? I doubt it. In my search for the June 2013 report I ran across this 1989 report from GAO on the very same topic. Said the GAO at the time:

(1) the Forest Service had a trail maintenance and reconstruction backlog of about $195 million, involving about 59,000 miles of trails; (2) 11 of the 121 forest units accounted for $91 million of the backlog costs; (3) funding fluctuations over the past decade resulted in a lack of Forest Service personnel and a declining pool of contractors and volunteers to keep the trails in good condition; (4) about 5,000 miles of trails were unusable because of deferred maintenance; (5) although the Forest Service annually reported the number of miles of trails maintained and constructed during the year, it neither routinely gathered data on maintenance and reconstruction needs or costs nor categorized needs by trail condition severity;

With the trail maintenance backlog growing (this is merely one indicator of the lack of management capacity), it would seem that Washington is institutionally incapable of maintaining its lands. Perhaps it is time to try a new approach?

It is great to see the opposition continue to build against ObamaCare. For an update on the latest health care-related news, come to this event on Saturday, July 27, at which I’ll be speaking along with RGF board member Dr. Deane Waldman. So much news, most of it bad for the law, continues to come out. The new letter from some of America’s largest private sector labor unions.

While the entire letter is worth a read, the following paragraphs encapsulate some of the major issues the unions (and millions of Americans) have with ObamaCare:

First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.

Second, millions of Americans are covered by non-profit health insurance plans like the ones in which most of our members participate. These non-profit plans are governed jointly by unions and companies under the Taft-Hartley Act. Our health plans have been built over decades by working men and women. Under the ACA as interpreted by the Administration, our employees will treated differently and not be eligible for subsidies afforded other citizens. As such, many employees will be relegated to second-class status and shut out of the help the law offers to for-profit insurance plans.

And finally, even though non-profit plans like ours won’t receive the same subsidies as for-profit plans, they’ll be taxed to pay for those subsidies. Taken together, these restrictions will make non-profit plans like ours unsustainable, and will undermine the health-care market of viable alternatives to the big health insurance companies.

The letter concludes, “We continue to stand behind real health care reform, but the law as it stands will hurt millions of Americans including the members of our respective unions.”

There are a few points worth noting here:

1) Unions can’t be this gullible. They should have seen this coming and their desire to “play ball” with Obama on health care is directly harming millions of union members;

2) You won’t see government employee unions like AFSCME among the opponents of ObamaCare because they benefit directly from bigger government. Private sector unions have to balance their desire for a robust market economy with the desire to obtain maximum benefits for their workers. It’s why FDR opposed government labor unions;

3) Opponents of ObamaCare must not only work to overturn this highly-vulnerable law, but to work to promote market-based health care reforms.

WatchdogWire.com, a project of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, mentors citizen journalists to hold their local and state officials accountable by reporting on public meetings, reports, etc.– the issues that the legacy media fails to cover.

They’re holding a writing contest through the end of July that asks citizens to judge the media.  Winner gets a cash prize of $300. There are 2 writing options:

Question 1: How has media changed since you were a child? Have the changes been for the better or worse?

Question 2: In the wake of recent scandals and national security violations, have the traditional media properly served our nation? How have they failed us, how have they served us, and what have you come to expect?

Check out the rest of the details here and please pass it on to anyone who you think might be interested!

Another opponent of New Mexico’s reasserting control over federally-managed land within its borders has spoken up, this time in the Las Cruces Sun-News. I previously responded to the charge that New Mexico couldn’t financially handle such commitments here, but this author makes another claim that I expect would be common among environmentalists and others who fear such a move: that the states will sell off their newly-acquired federal lands.

Aside from the fact that governments at all levels LOVE to acquire land and property, this might sound like a reasonable fear. One must also account for the large numbers of interest groups — including enviros and sportsmen — who would also completely freak out if any of their desired lands were sold off to private interests.

The reality is that sportsmen are steadily losing access to federal lands as bureaucrats and environmentalists work together to impose limits on their activities. States like New Mexico know that hunting and fishing pay a lot of money for those permits and will be more responsive to their concerns than will Washington.

We were blessed this week to have the heads of the state think tanks from Oklahoma and Michigan in town this week to discuss the concept of “Competitive Federalism” and Right to Work.

No Right to Work event is complete without protesters and a few union supporters were out to express their opposition to worker freedom. Check out the photos here, here, and here.

Michael Carnuccio of the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs had the following thoughts about his visit to New Mexico as expressed in his weekly column.

And lastly, we have video of Carnuccio’s presentation on “Competitive Federalism:”

How Competitive Federalism Can Spur New Mexico’s Economy from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

And, here is the panel discussion that took place with Lehman, Carnuccio, and Gessing explaining the issues surrounding Right to Work in the respective states.

7-11-13 Right to Work Panel from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

The House, with only Republican support (including New Mexico Rep. Pearce), passed a terrible farm bill of which Heritage Foundation had this to say:

Virtually every pro-free market organization opposed this legislation which is both a policy and a political debacle including the R Street Project and Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In my opinion, agriculture subsidies are among the most economically-harmful dollars spent by the federal government because they are the “low-hanging-fruit” of deficit reduction. Now, we have Republicans giving Obama a golden chance to look like a fiscal conservative by opposing this legislation. Farmers in New Mexico and around the nation need to be taken off welfare just as the food stamp program needs to be dramatically reformed to root out significant fraud and waste.

Land ownership means power and if there is one thing that we know, government officials love to accumulate power. Let us count the ways:

Syndicated writer Paul Jacob notes in this article that legislation has been introduced in Congress HR 2617 to create a National Park at the site of the Apollo landing site. Never mind that the United States doesn’t own the moon or that it is uninhabited (and possibly uninhabitable), Washington needs to control a portion of the moon.

Of course, Washington owns plenty of land here at home. Here is a map showing the exact holdings and this map shows the percentage by state. President Obama recently increased federal control over lands in New Mexico with the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument designation while some advocates for increased federal land ownership intensity wish to completely surround Las Cruces with yet another national monument.

Lastly, there is Bernalillo County which already owns dozens of properties throughout the County and is the largest single property owner in downtown Albuquerque (including a building that houses a Verizon call center!). Now, the County has engaged in initial discussions to purchase the massive Alvarado Square building (formerly occupied by PNM).

The same rule should apply from the federal government on down: any new property acquisition must be offset by sale of land/property of similar value. Whether the issue is simple mismanagement or the fact that government lands are not taxed and therefore get taken off the tax rolls (thus burdening the rest of us with higher taxes), governments at all levels own more than enough land/property.

<p align="center"
Join the Rio Grande Foundation in
Celebrating "Milton Friedman Day"

The late economist Milton Friedman was one of history's greatest opponents of occupational licensure. In his writings and repeatedly in interviews, Friedman made the case for worker freedom and against the cartelization of various professions.

No other organization in American has done more to preserve and advance Friedman's vision of a free market in human labor than has the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm. The organization published a detailed report on licensing laws in the 50 states "License to Work" which details licensing laws in the various states. According to the 2012 report, New Mexico has the 12th most burdensome licensing laws and is the 9th most extensively and onerously licensed state.

Unnecessary licensing laws place obstacles in front of entrepreneurs, thus making their lives more difficult, but also reducing voluntary economic activity and making us all poorer.

As part of global celebrations of Dr. Friedman's legacy and in celebration of his birthday on July 31, the Rio Grande Foundation is hosting a luncheon with Tim Keller, Executive Director of the Arizona Chapter of the Institute for Justice.

The luncheon will be held from noon to 1:00PM on Wednesday, July 31 at the Marriott Pyramid at Paseo del Norte and I-25. Cost is $25 if you register by Wednesday, July 24. Cost is $35 if you register after the 24th.

Click here to register online or send us a check with a note including the names of attendees at: PO Box 40336, Albuquerque, NM 87196. If you have questions, call us at 505-264-6090.

Tim successfully defended Mesa brake shop owner Randy Bailey, when the City sought to take his property through eminent domain so it could hand the property over to the owner of an Ace hardware store.

Among Tim's victories was his work on behalf of Christian Alf, a teenager from Tempe, Ariz., who sought to help senior citizens rat-proof their home by bending wire mesh around any openings. Until Tim stepped in on Alf's behalf, an Arizona state agency had demanded the young entrepreneur secure an exterminator's license.

Tim's legal strategy, like that of the Institute for Justice, is to fight for people's liberties not only in the court of law, but also through legislation and the media.

According to recent news reports, taxpayers continue to pour money into Ladera Golf Course. Full disclosure, I am a golfer and as a West Side resident, have played Ladera many times.

However, it is hard to argue that golf is a core function of government and that millions of dollars should be paid by taxpayers for something that can and is provided by private sector providers. Even Detroit has taken the step of privatizing the management of its golf courses to positive effect and it is just one of many cities to have done so.

So, let’s have an experiment. Leave the other golf courses alone, but let a private company come in and do what it can to salvage the situation at Ladera. Give them control over hiring and firing and pricing, but tell them “no more tax dollars” and see what happens. It can’t get any worse than it is now and it might just result in a turnaround. Nothing will happen if we don’t do something different.