In this audio interview with Bill Frezza of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Calle tells how he escaped a failing public school system in Chino, California, to become a passionate advocate for infusing competition into education. Calle believes Republicans could galvanize crossover and swing voters by better engaging on the issue.

But Tesla demanded — and won — so many breaks from the state of Nevada that the deal is an affront to any true believer in free-market economics. This is from the Chronicle:

Nevada won the fierce, five-state competition to host Tesla Motors’ planned $5 billion battery factory by offering a package of tax breaks and credits that could be worth $1.2 billion over the next 20 years, according to terms released by state officials Thursday. … Tesla won’t have to pay sales tax for 20 years. The company also won’t have to pay real property, personal property and modified business taxes for 10 years.

The size of the deal and the scope of the tax breaks makes this feel more like South Korean crony capitalism — the government in Seoul is a de facto partner of conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai — then American capitalism.

But as Dan Morain points out in his Sac Bee column, this is increasingly common:

Nevada is simply following a trend. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, Good Jobs First, tracks such giveaways. Tennessee gave Volkswagen $554 million in incentives. Mississippi gave a $1.3 billion package to Nissan in 2000. Oregon gave $2 billion in incentives to Intel.

“Unfortunately, it is common to see subsidies of this size,” Leigh McIlvaine, a research analyst for Good Jobs First. “There seems to be a perception on behalf of companies that they should be paid by the public sector to finance that growth. It is looking like an entitlement.”

California lawmakers are not shy about opening the treasury to help companies. They approved $420 million in tax breaks this summer for Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, on condition that they build new bombers in California.

Milton Friedman: Big biz a foe of free market

I get the argument that Tesla is a unique company, and that Northrop and Lockheed are fairly unique as well, so the argument that these government gifts are hugely unfair to their rivals isn’t as apt as it when it’s made about tax breaks given to specific companies in more competitive industries. But at some point, I share Milton Friedman’s concerns, as noted by the Heartland Institute in 2012, about government and industry acting in synch.

Friedman exemplified the generous spirit behind the desire for free markets: they benefit the less-wealthy by leveling the playing field, allowing people to succeed on their merits instead of through political power bought with big money. Friedman had nothing but contempt for crony capitalism and the use of government to suppress market competition, although he was too polite and good-natured to express that feeling in any way but through sound economic arguments.

Friedman himself put this sentiment another way in a 1977 article for Reason magazine:

The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States … have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.

Maybe it’s pointless to worry about this six years after the federal takeover of the banking system, General Motors and Chrysler during the financial crisis, but there’s something really ominous about big government partnering with and/or propping up certain favored big businesses.

The initiatives they work on then become, in the lexicon of 2008, “too big to fail.” It’s not hard to imagine Nevada moving from tax breaks to direct subsidies if the Tesla “gigafactory” struggles to live up to its billing and needs help to survive — taxpayer help.

That is, much, much more taxpayer help.

By Brian Calle

In this interview, I talked to Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of the Friedman Center for Educational Choice. He describes the exciting developments across the country, including “some movement in California.”

The center is named after the late Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman, who would have been 100 this year.

By Katy Grimes

As free marketeers celebrate famed Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s 100 birthday today, revisiting Friedman’s 1979 interview with Phil Donahue, where Friedman schooled Donahue, a 1970’s liberal television talk show host, on capitalism. This is an important reminder of why we fight for the free market.

Friedman, born July 31, 1912, and died November 16, 2006, easily dispelled the common liberal notion that capitalists are greedy, and demonstrated to Donahue how manipulated America has become by anti-free market government forces.

Donahue asked Friedman if the maldistribution of wealth, the haves and have nots, and greed, a good idea to run countries on?

Friedman asked Donahue if he thought Russia, China or the rest of the world doesn’t run on greed?

“The masses are worst off in the kinds of societies that depart from capitalism, and free enterprise,” Friedman said.

“But it seems to reward not virtue as much as it does the ability to manipulate the system,” said Donahue.

“And what does reward virtue?” asked Friedman. “Does a communist commisary reward virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virture?”

This short video clip is as important today as it was in 1979. Enjoy Milton Friedman – Greed.

And remember that “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

A few more of my favorite Friedman quotes:

* “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

* “Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

* “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.”

* The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.

* “There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent, and second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 percent — William Graham Sumner’s famous example of B and C decided what D shall do for A. The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or ineffective way to help the disadvantaged — but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty. The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.”

*  “Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”

* “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”