The issue of property rights gets no respect these days in American jurisprudence. One recent case from New Mexico involved a lesbian couple that was refused service by a photography studio. The decision came down in favor of the couple and their demand that the studio take their pictures whether they wanted to or not. Another recent issue has come to the fore involving a Walgreens pharmacist and their refusal to fill a woman’s birth control prescription. Lastly, there is, of course, the big federal issue relating to ObamaCare and the freedom of religious institutions to not provide birth control at no charge.

These all sound like very difficult issues and to some extent they are. They pit the rights of an individual, business, or religious institution to control how their own resources are used. Do I own my time and money or do other people/the government have claims against me for those?

Unfortunately, our society and the courts take a dim view of property rights. Instead, the dominant political view is that government should be empowered to force you to do business in a manner of their preference. There are inevitably “rabbit holes” on both sides of the issue. Should businesses be able to discriminate against racial minorities? I would hope they wouldn’t, but I’d also expect that other businesses would set up shop to serve those groups in a free market.

Should a Hooters have to hire male waiters? It would seem to defeat their business model, but they are clearly discriminating on the basis of sex. Of course, in the case of Walgreens and the pharmacist not wanting to dispense birth control, Walgreens could (and probably should) consider firing the individual. Of course, in a world in which birth control was not controlled by the federal government’s prescription regime, a competitor could easily set up shop to serve this population and mail-order pharmacy would seem an ideal alternative.

In the case of the Catholic Church and birth control, why are employers in charge of providing health care for their employees in the first place?

Proponents of ending discrimination are well-intentioned, but too often underestimate the power and flexibility of the truly free market in righting past wrongs.

One of the great unreported environmental stories of the last few years is that despite “doing nothing” (at least explicitly at the national level) to reduce carbon emissions, the United States may very well achieve its non-binding goal reducing carbon emissions 17% by 2020. The shocker is that unlike Europe, this news comes despite the fact that the US has not adopted onerous legislation (like the Kyoto Protocols) for the express purpose of fighting carbon emissions. Also, the US population continues to rise more rapidly.

Instead, the US has adopted new and more efficient techniques (like fracking) for clean natural gas. It is easily forgotten among the environmentalist crowd that businesses operating in a free market have a strong financial incentive to cut waste and reduce unnecessary energy expenditures. This approach appears to hold promise, at least relative to the European, top-down approach

At the Rio Grande Foundation, we have not been shy about criticizing Heather Wilson’s record on spending and the size of government (see here and here as just two examples). However, a radical environmental group is now running television ads that attack Wilson in a way that is very misleading on the issue of a fuel additive called “MTBE.” Check out the ad here.

Several years ago, MTBE put in use in 1979 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved it as a way to replace lead content and promote cleaner-burning gasoline. Unfortunately, MTBE causes big problems when it leaks into water supplies. The U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision in its 2005 energy bill that protects energy producers from lawsuits that are being filed over adding MTBE to gasoline, because the producers’ actions were taken to comply with federal law. Heather Wilson supported this effort when she was in the House.

MTBE spills should be cleaned up and no one is disputing that. It should also be recognized that federal policies are at the core of this issue. Lawsuits will only help the trial lawyers, a key constituency of the Democratic Party. They do nothing to actually get MTBE out of the water (will likely slow the process as it bogs down in lawsuits) and environmentalists should know this.

Supreme Court decisions, like babies, wait for no one, so it is at this late date that I put some thoughts together on the Supreme Court’s decision in upholding the federal health care law known as “ObamaCare” which was handed down last Thursday morning. The good news is that the dust is starting to settle and nuances of the decision are coming out including the revelation that Chief Justice Roberts changed his mind on the law in order to deliver Obama a 5-4 majority.

With all that has been said about the decision, it is worth noting that conservatives can often be counted on to support massive government power grabs, despite supposed ideological concerns, but liberals rarely surprise anyone by casting votes against government power. “Growth” only works in one direction, I suppose.

Ultimately, the health care mess, regardless of the Court’s decision, was going to fall back into the laps of the American people. Even had the Court ruled in the opposite direction by striking down ObamaCare, the need to peel back decades of government meddling (including Bush’s prescription drug benefit) and regulations was dire. Now, we just face another layer of rules and regulations.

Dare I state the obvious that the only surefire way to kill this law is non-compliance? If you don’t have insurance, don’t get it and don’t pay the fine. They can’t put us all in jail. Myself, I have a health savings account that is likely to become far more expensive due to ObamaCare.

It’s always nice when New Mexico receives positive national recognition. Our state appears at the bottom of all-too-many good lists and at the top of all too many bad ones.

So, it is nice that the magazine Forbes saw fit to include Albuquerque and Las Cruces in its list of 25 Best Places To Retire at 25 and 10 respectively. Our sunny weather, mountain views, and low taxes on retirees were cited among the positives these two cities had to offer.

It’s nice anytime New Mexico is recognized for good things in national reports. Unfortunately, retirees do not drive economic growth. What does drive economic growth is entrepreneurs starting businesses and hiring people to work at them. Retirees are largely consumers of goods and services. Some of them volunteer and many of them contribute in important ways to their communities, but few of them by definition are starting businesses.

Why does New Mexico attract retirees, but not businesses (no Fortune 500 company is headquartered within our borders)? For starters, our overall tax burden is relatively high (14th in the nation as a portion of personal income according to the Federation of Tax Administrators). More money in government’s coffers often means less to start or operate a business.

Of course, a relatively heavy tax burden does not impact everyone equally. Our state’s tax code is also set up to protect wealth, not the creation of wealth. According to the Tax Foundation, property taxes generate the second-lowest percentage of overall revenue among the states. I am not saying that high property taxes don’t stifle economic growth or that we should raise property taxes, rather this data is meant to explain why New Mexico is popular with retirees while remaining economically impoverished.

While our property taxes are low, our “sales tax,” which is properly known as the gross receipts tax, taxes a variety of business inputs and services that are left untaxed in other states. These include payments to lawyers and contractors that are often a necessary part of small businesses. Gov. Martinez and the Legislature took steps to mitigate this situation earlier this year, but a more thorough discussion of tax reform is needed.

Not satisfied with taxing those who wish to start businesses and generate wealth, New Mexico also regulates them quite heavily. According to the Institute for Justice’s report “License to Work” which grades states on their regulatory requirements to engage in productive economic behavior, New Mexico “is the ninth most broadly and onerously licensed state with the 12th most burdensome licensing laws.”

It is worth mentioning that a high quality educational system can assist in the creation of an educated workforce which also leads to the creation of businesses and economic growth. The poor performance of New Mexico’s K-12 system has been known for years and Gov. Martinez has made reform a top priority.

Recently, several critiques including those from the Rio Grande Foundation and the US Chamber of Commerce have highlighted problems in higher education. An improved higher education system is also necessary to generate future business leaders.

When policymakers consider ways to make New Mexico wealthier while it remains an attractive retirement destination, it is important to realize that there needn’t be a tradeoff between the two. For example, 21 of the top 25 retirement destinations (including all of the top five) are “Right to Work” states. This policy reform increases productivity and labor market flexibility, making a given state more attractive to small and big businesses alike.

Appearing on a “good” list is nice and we welcome retirees to New Mexico with open arms and encourage them to stay. To make New Mexico truly prosperous, however, we need to enact policy reforms targeted at growing our economy.

Paul Gessing is the President of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.

(Albuquerque) In early June, the Rio Grande Foundation published a report “How Transparent Are New Mexico’s Institutes of Higher Education?” which published payroll data for New Mexico’s institutes of higher education. This report also included links to payroll data from all of the institutes that complied with our requests.

One of the institutes, Northern New Mexico College, that received an “F” in our original report has complied fully with our request and will receive a revised grade of “A.” The school’s website now includes the following website: http://site.nnmc.edu/public-records which includes all relevant information for submitting a records request. The payroll records themselves are now available here.

Said Paul Gessing, President of the Rio Grande Foundation, “Our original efforts to obtain public records from Northern New Mexico College, were frustrated due to inability to find a contact for such requests on their website. This may have been our fault in not looking in the right place, their fault in terms of broken links or poor website design, or some combination of the two.”

Gessing continued, “We are pleased that Northern New Mexico Community College has responded to our critique and has made great strides in transparency with a clearly-listed point of contact and a timely response in terms of the information requested. We hope that all institutes that received a low grade in our report will follow suit.”

The New Mexico Public Employees Retirement Association is considering reducing future retirement benefits for more than 54,000 government workers, mostly because of growing concerns about the solvency of the fund.

It’s about time. The main reason why so many state and local governments are bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, is the combination of government-run monopolies and government-employee unions.

Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies.

As reported, the unfunded liability of the PERA fund has more than doubled in the past two years, from $2.3 billion in mid-2009 to $4.9 billion as of mid-2011. The unfunded liability is the difference between future retirement benefits due and assets on hand.

Carter Bundy, the political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, is on record as saying, “the union believes the base retirement formula used to determine a worker’s pension should not be altered.” To that I say, the economics of the world have been altered, if Bundy hasn’t noticed.

There is a huge difference between private- and public-sector union employees. For example, when the employees of a grocery story go on strike and shut down the store, consumers can simply shop elsewhere and grocery-store management is perfectly free to hire replacement workers. In contrast, when a city goes on strike, there is no school and no garbage collection as long as the strike goes on. Teacher tenure and civil service regulations make it extremely costly if not virtually impossible to hire replacement workers.

The enormous power of government-employee unions effectively transfers the power to tax from voters to the unions. Because government-employee unions can so easily force elected officials to raise taxes to meet their “demands,” it is they, not the voters, who control the rate of taxation within a political jurisdiction.

Politicians are caught in a political bind by government-employee unions: If they cave in to their wage demands and raise taxes to finance them, then they increase the chances of being kicked out of office themselves in the next election.
The “solution” to this dilemma has been to offer government-employee unions moderate wage increases but spectacular pension promises. This allows politicians to pander to the unions but defer the costs to the future.

As taxpayers in New Mexico are realizing, the future has arrived. The PERA fund has $16.8 billion in future obligations and $11.9 billion on hand as of the most recent calculation. New Mexico must either raise taxes dramatically to fund these liabilities, or drastically cut back or eliminate government-employee pensions.

Government-employee unions are also champions of “featherbedding” – the union practice of forcing employers to hire more than the number of people necessary to do the job. If this occurs in the private sector, the higher wage costs will make the firm less competitive and less profitable.

No such thing happens in government, where there are not profit-and-loss statements in an accounting sense, and most agencies are monopolies anyway.

In 2012, as we have witnessed Scott Walker not being recalled as governor in Wisconsin because of his tough stance on public-employee unions, this pension charade appears to be on its way to being over.

American taxpayers finally seem to be aware that they are the servants, not the masters, of government at all levels.

Government-employee unions have played a key role in causing bankruptcy in most American states. We, in New Mexico, are at a crucial decision-point to decide not to travel that road to financial ruination and say “no more” to the pension demands of destructive public-employee unions.

Tom Molitor is adjunct scholar with New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation. The Rio Grande Foundation is an independent, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and educational organization dedicated to promoting prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.

EJ Dionne is an ardent left-winger whose columns appear regularly in the Albuquerque Journal. I tend not to agree with much of what he writes, but found his recent column which attempts to separate the US future from Greece’s present to be particularly troubling.

He trots out the usual leftist arguments about the stimulus needing to be bigger and argues that Greece would be better off if it had a strong central government to aggressively stimulate its economy; then he rhapsodizes about the bank bailouts and the fact that the federal government was also not aggressive enough in pursing those; Lastly, he praises the Federal Reserve and its power to keep a united banking system in line as opposed to Europe’s fragmented system.

This all misses the forest for the trees. Greece is a small nation. It is more like an individual US state. If Greece were allowed to fail and were forced to abandon the Euro, the rest of Europe would be just fine. True, the European Union is mis-designed in the sense that it calls for a single currency while giving individual nations the ability to set their own banking and spending policies and this is a problem that the US Constitution avoided, but Dionne does nothing to contradict the point that if America continues to over-spend, we’ll have a fiscal crisis and riots in the streets. The difference is that there will be no one (except possibly the Chinese) to bail us out.

Greece will only be saved by a combination of labor market/regulatory/fiscal reforms that increase productivity and reduce government spending. The United States will only be saved by a combination of these same reforms with the same result. Clearly, we are a bigger, more powerful, perhaps even “too big to fail” nation on Greece’s trajectory. And lest you think that hope is lost, look no further than Canada which relied on a variety of free market reforms to pull itself out of an economic nosedive.

(Albuquerque) According to recent stories in the press, New Mexico’s largest public employee union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 18, has filed a lawsuit in state District Court attempting to compel the Martinez Administration to remove the names and salary information of the state’s “classified” workers from New Mexico’s “Sunshine Portal”: http://sunshineportalnm.com/

The Rio Grande Foundation strongly favors transparency and openness when taxpayer dollars are at stake and has requested and posted the state payroll – including names and salaries of all state employees – on its website. The data are presented by month, starting with January and going through June of 2012.

January
February
March
April
May
June

“Unfortunately,” as Rio Grande Foundation President Paul Gessing pointed out, “while we are able to post the information ourselves as the state payroll is indeed public information, the biggest issue is that outside of the Sunshine Portal, information is not presented in a clear and concise manner. So, if AFSCME somehow wins their lawsuit, they are in no way preserving their members’ privacy, rather they are just making it more difficult for average citizens to actually understand what the data actually mean”

“The Sunshine Portal is the ideal way to post public records and documents. Efforts should be focused on expanding and improving upon the site, not restricting what information can be made available on it,” concluded Gessing.

Apropos of the front page spread on the ever-so controversial Wal Mart proposed for the West Side of Albuquerque (near my home), I saw a new study from two economists discussing how housing prices are impacted by the location of a Wal Mart nearby. Obviously, traffic could be a problem and several other factors have been brought forth by the NIMBY crowd in opposition to the store, but perhaps those concerned about having a rebound in home prices might want to know that, according to the authors:

In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1
mile.

I know that my house took a serious hit in price when the market tanked in 2008 and I’d lie to see a turnaround, but the real issue here is that conveniences like shopping centers make people MORE, not LESS likely to want to live in a given location. I know that is shocking, but it is why more and more Americans continue to move to cities.

As if to simply affirm what the Rio Grande foundation has been saying about New Mexico’s higher education system (see here, here, and here), a new 50-state report card from the US Chamber of Commerce and Institute for a Competitive Workforce, ranks New Mexico poorly on many aspects of higher education.

A few of the lowlights from the report:

4 year Access and Success: “D”, 2 year “F”;
Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness “D” for both 4 and 2 year;
4 yearMeeting Labor Market Demand “D”, 2 year “F”;
4 year Transparency and Accountability “F”, 2 year “D”;

The full report is worth a read.

The Rio Grande Foundation, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), National Taxpayers Union, and several other groups, submitted this letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee today.

POGO had this blog posting explaining the status of the debate and the issues at hand. Unfortunately (albeit not surprisingly), both Heather Wilson and Martin Heinrich who are running for New Mexico’s open US Senate seat are trying to “one-up” each other in supporting the costly boondoggle.

Heather Wilson has long been among the most liberal-spending Republicans while Heinrich came to Washington as a left-wing liberal and has gotten worse on spending each year.

All too often, people come along and say: “there oughta be a law” or “government should do….” This view was expressed relative to the Petroglyphs National Monument by a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

While I certainly respect PEER’s having called attention to this issue, I find fault with the attitude that more government is the answer to cleaning up this national monument. My letter which can be found below was printed recently in the paper:

Certainly, it is hard to disagree with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility that “something” needs to be done to clean up trash and junk at the Petroglyph National Monument. The question is, how?

Study after study by the Government Accountability Office has found that the federal government is incapable of adequately managing its own lands. In 2003, the GAO reported that the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog was more than $5 billion. Since then, federal land acquisitions have accelerated, placing even greater burdens on an obviously inefficient and overstrained system.

While the City of Albuquerque’s lands are much more limited, governments inevitably suffer from unlimited demands upon limited resources. Patrolling for dumping never seems to be at the top of the priority list (usually for good reason).

Rather than waiting for either government to act, perhaps PEER and other concerned citizens could put together volunteer groups to clean up the Petroglyphs? Perhaps they could even form a non-profit to actually clean up the land rather than lobbying the government to do so? The size and scope of the federal government’s indebtedness need not be re-stated in full detail here and this seems like one small way in which we can take responsibility for improving our small portion of the country without waiting for someone from the government to do it for us.

Environmentalists are a funny bunch. They often claim the mantle of popular opinion, but rarely do they talk about the costs and the real-world tradeoffs associated with government policies aimed at forcing us all to be “green” (at least according to their definition). They also talk a lot about transparency (at least when it comes to their opponents).

But, the moment someone tries to illustrate that “green” policies cost consumers more, they cry foul. The case of PNM’s proposal to put a line item on their electric bills showing that consumers are being forced to pay more for electricity generated by wind and solar generated howling opposition from Steve Michel, chief counsel for Western Resource Advocates who said, “Line-item treatment of renewable energy on bills creates a target for customer dissatisfaction.”

Duh! As the Rio Grande Foundation pointed out in its study of New Mexico’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, ratepayers in the state will be forced to pay an additional $2.3 billion for electricity over the period of 2011 to 2020. That number is back-loaded as the number ratchets up from a mere 10% renewables in 2011 to 20% renewables by 2020.

As Jonah Goldberg recently noted in his Albuquerque speech, utilities like PNM are the preferred model of today’s left. Government-imposed rules and regulations raise costs while ignorant consumers blame the company and free enterprise, not policymakers, for price hikes and shoddy service. If we are all going to pay more for our electricity, we should at least be told why.

Jonah Goldberg spoke in Albuquerque on his new book “Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” and the 2012 elections. We had another sellout crowd in attendance and a great time. Video of Jonah’s speech can be found below. For those who couldn’t make it or would like a copy of Jonah’s book, the Rio Grande Foundation has a limited supply of signed copies. Call us at: 505-264-6090 for details.

Jonah Goldberg presentation on Tyranny of Cliches in Albuquerque, New Mexico from Paul Gessing on Vimeo.

I admit it. I’m skeptical of democracy. Voters have natural biases, lack information, and simply don’t care enough due to their rational ignorance to make informed decisions much of the time. That doesn’t mean that voting is bad; it’s just that I trust markets where businesses and consumers have some skin in the game and an incentive to research their purchase/sale more.

But some seem to thrive on ignorant voters. Take the controversy over elimination of straight ticket voting. It is amazing that this is such a big deal. If someone is a Democrat and they really support Democrats, one would think that they can muster up the will to fill in the circles for their preferred candidates. Same thing with the Republicans.

But, some Democrats have expressed “outrage” that straight ticket voting has been eliminated. Obviously, you can still vote all “D” or all “R,” just not by filling in one circle. Talk about lazy! And we rely on these supposedly informed and intelligent voters to elect people to wield the monopoly on violence known as the state….

Interesting take on the situation in America’s higher education system from syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hansen.

Over at NMPolitics.net, I expand upon some of the Rio Grande Foundation’s recent research (here and here) on higher education with an article of my own.

I remember a time when liberals liked the First Amendment to the US Constitution (the ACLU, for one, still does). You know, the one that reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That was before the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. So, a bunch of left wingers who don’t like speech they disagree with have been busy trying to undermine the decision by passing resolutions in opposition of the law (like the one that was pushed through the Legislature this year). Albuquerque City Councilor Rey Garduño is the latest culprit with this resolution which will be discussed at City Council tonight. Sorry Rey. Free speech is free speech whether you like it or not. That’s the point.

An interesting article caught my attention in the “careers” section of the Sunday paper. The article discussed something called a “portable skills certificate.” Basically, it is a private certification that you have a particular set of skills.

Why is this important? For starters, in an age when a high school and even a college diploma means little in terms of specific skills, it is a private sector attempt to actually quantify what skills a potential employee has. Even better, this is an end-round of the traditional, failing, government education system and it shows a potential path forward for increased reliance on meaningful certification developed in the private sector not just for basic manufacturing skills, but for basic skills like reading and math.

I’m sure that the people behind this certification process do not want to be seen as “competing” with the traditional school systems, but I can only imagine how much more cost-effective and responsive to the needs of both individuals and the marketplace itself, the private sector could make the educational/skills acquisition process.

Jonah Goldberg will be joining many friends and supporters of the Rio Grande Foundation for lunch on Wednesday (more info here). He has a great column over at National Review Online, where he writes a regular column, on the left’s broad-based support for any conservative that is no longer in office.

The simple fact that Mitt Romney seemingly is the GOP’s nominee for President (with his many apostasies from conservative thought) would seem to illustrate that the Republican Party is not more conservative than it was in the past, but that fact seems to be ignored by too many pundits.

By State law, payroll information is considered public information. We at the Rio Grande Foundation have been working under this law to provide to the public payroll information for New Mexico’s largest cities, all counties, the largest school districts, and universities.

Unfortunately, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) doesn’t seem to like transparency and is suing Gov. Martinez for placing the payroll for state workers on the Sunshine Portal. The good news? For starters, this action makes AFSCME look out of touch. The better news? Regardless of the outcome of this lawsuit, payroll records for all state employees will remain online because I have sent the following request for public records to the State Personnel Office and the Rio Grande Foundation will be posting the records on our website as soon as we get them.

This is a formal request under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act. I wish to obtain electronic copies of the employee name, department, title, rate, and annual salary of all employees of the State of New Mexico for 2012. I request this information to be sent in an electronic format, preferably a pdf or excel spreadsheet to me at info@riograndefoundation.org.

If the file is too large to be emailed, I can provide a USB drive for copying electronic records. Please notify me when the records are available for inspection. I can be reached by phone at (505) 264-6090. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

The debate over the merits of unions is often muddled and confused by advocates and detractors alike. The recent article from someone named Tim Taylor that appeared in the Albuquerque Journal is only the most recent case. The article which defends unions has several problems

The author makes the unfortunate mistake of not differentiating between government and private sector unions. Generally, conservatives have no problem with the existence of private sector unions, but there are problems with the mere existence of public sector unions which represent government workers. As long as unions and the companies union members work for must compete in a private sector, the worst that can happen is that the union strangles the host company and makes them uncompetitive (as happened with the domestic auto industry). But, in a free market, consumers can choose to patronize or not patronize union companies. UPS which is heavily unionized, competes against FEDEX as just one example.

The problem, of course, with government unions is that they don’t compete in a free market. Money used to pay them is forcibly taken in the form of taxes and consumers cannot easily choose a competitor. Also, government labor unions are able to organize and contribute to electing their bosses and then sit across a bargaining table from them. Even FDR opposed them.

The author also asks “what is the one democratic institution in the workplace?” I’m not even sure what this means. Yes, unions vote on lots of stuff, but they also take a portion of workers’ paychecks and in New Mexico this is done automatically. In Wisconsin, when Gov. Scott Walker gave public employees the choice of whether or not to pay union dues — as opposed to having them automatically pulled from their paychecks — the number of dues-paying union members shrank rapidly. The state’s second-largest union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, had membership fall to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, the Journal said Thursday. The organization’s Afscme Council 24, composed of state workers, fell more than two thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

So, it would seem that government workers who are given a clear choice on whether to join the union or not, often decide not to join the union. That’s one reason I’m skeptical of “democracy.” Votes are cheap. In New Mexico they can be bought and sold for liquor. What I support is people who are willing to invest or remove their money from a specific company or union based on the value they believe they are getting from it (after all, we spend time working for money). In the case of Wisconsin, apparently workers aren’t buying what their union is selling.

Scary, that’s how I’d describe the fact that the author of this misguided and racially-charged piece once headed up the health care reform offices of Gov. Martinez. Clearly, the Administration either didn’t vet Derksen or they don’t understand just how central the issue of health care reform is to human freedom.

Here is my critique of the article:

1) Bringing up George Wallace and racism simply doesn’t fly. Denial of equal rights under the law is far different from not being given “free” health care at taxpayers’ expense. There is not a doctor in this country that I have ever heard of refusing to see minorities. Conflating these issues does nothing to move the debate forward.

2) The author states that “It’s estimated that someone dies each day in New Mexico for lack of health insurance.” This is simply wrong and illustrates an obvious misunderstanding of the appropriate role of insurance. No one in the history of the planet has died from a lack of insurance. People do die for lack of quality and affordable health care, but that has nothing to do with insurance per se.

In fact, insurance is a major problem in American health care, not a solution. We need to restore the fiduciary relationship between doctors and their patients, not provide even more incentives for Americans to expect their employers and insurers to pay more for our routine care and checkups.

Of course, if anyone DOES die for lack of care in this country, it should not be for lack of emergency care as hospitals cannot refuse to treat those who cannot pay for emergency care.

3) Derksen is all for expanding Medicaid as will be done if ObamaCare is upheld, but questions about as to whether Medicaid actually improves health care outcomes or expands access to health care.

Obviously, health care is a complicated issue. Most of this complexity is the result of government meddling. ObamaCare and its 2,700 pages, certainly does nothing to reduce this complexity. Hopefully, the departure of Derksen from the Martinez Administration means that she will fight for real health care reform, not more government control.

Today the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced that it is withdrawing its proposal to add the Sand Dune Lizard to the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act. The lizard, which is native to Southeastern New Mexico, has generated a great deal of controversy and concern that listing would negatively impact both New Mexico’s oil and gas industry and the state economy. The Rio Grande Foundation is pleased with this decision. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar praised the efforts of the oil and gas industry in working to preserve the lizard’s habitat through Candidate Conservation Agreements, saying they were “nothing short of historic.”

The good news is that New Mexico gets a reprieve on the lizard. The bad news is that the Endangered Species Act remains open to abuse by environmental groups.

More information from our friends at Energy Makes America Great can be found here.