Dear Editor,
When I first saw Prof. Calvert's screed in your spring issue ("The Tyranny of the Minority: Rob Natelson and the Tax Protest Movement"), I did not plan to dignify it with an answer. I assumed that subsequent events were answer enough. But several friends have urged me to respond, pointing out that events must be explained and that many intelligent Montanans have been fooled by caricatures drawn by people like Calvert. So here goes:
A correction. Calvert's statement that I gave my "intellectual imprimatur" to the CI-66 and CI-67 tax limitation initiatives is just plain wrong. While I do think them worth voter consideration, I have not taken a public stand on the substance of either measure, and Montanans for Better Government, the organization I chair, is officially neutral on both.
Calvert's legal theories. As he admits in his article, Calvert and his coven of special interests sued me, Montanans for Better Government, and the Secretary of State to kill Montanans' state constitutional right to petition to send tax measures to referendum. Note that they did not sue merely to invalidate a particular suspension; their goal was to cancel for all time the public's right to vote on taxes without legislative permission. Despite their fulminations about "the minority," what they really feared was the majority.
Much of Calvert's article is an exposition of the "legal theories" advanced in support of this lawsuit. The kindest thing that can be said about these "legal theories" is that they were creative. Creativity is important in legal advocacy, but it is no substitute for either justice or precedent. Calvert's arguments offered neither, and the Montana Supreme Court responded accordingly by preserving our right to vote on tax bills, including IR-112 (H.B. 671), the 1993 legislature's retroactive tax increase.
Fiscal apocalypse. Calvert was one of many who predicted fiscal apocalypse if the tax increase were suspended. As I said at the time, those predictions were untenable: The IR-112 tax hike was less than two percent of state biennium revenues, and its suspension still left the state with a very large revenue increase over the previous biennium.
Petition opponents tried to sell their apocalyptic visions by chopping the total $5.4 billion budget into convenient slices, and then talking about how devastating the revenue loss would be if concentrated on one slice. Calvert plays the same game in his article, choosing the general fund (about 21% of the total budget) as his slice. However, this technique has been used so many times in Montana, its effectiveness with the public is waning.
Since Calvert's article was published, his fiscal arguments have begun to look not just untenable but ridiculous. Despite suspension, Montana now is projected to have a sizable biennium surplus--which is no surprise to those of us who thought from the beginning that the pre-budget estimates had been fudged to create a public perception that tax hikes were necessary and inevitable.
Calvert's caricature. In one respect, Calvert surprised me: his article displays an utter lack of "opposition research." Unless Calvert is being deliberately dishonest (which I doubt), his misunderstanding of our ideas is bizarre beyond belief. Example: he thinks we oppose a publicly-funded police force!
Apparently, Calvert has never seriously examined any of our literature or public statements--a serious tactical error for a warrior and an inexcusable one for a scholar. To the extent he's not simply making stuff up, I suspect he's getting his information from one of Montana's major dailies, several of which rigorously black out our primary message in their zeal to protect the existing order.
(Lest you think that statement is hyperbole: I once gave a lecture in Great Falls that lasted, with questions, about an hour and a half. The topic was "reinventing government." There was a single question about taxes. The next day my picture was on the front page of the Great Falls Tribune with a screeching headline about taxes and not a single word about reinventing! The Tribune is also one of several papers that censor most of what I write.)
Our actual views. For those of your readers who have been similarly misled, here are the facts about Rob Natelson and Montanans for Better Government:
We are not a tax protest or libertarian group. We believe in efficient, properly funded, and responsive public services. We believe in public funding of education, police, courts, aid to the indigent, and the other customary functions of government.
The primary focus of Montanans for Better Government is promoting government structural reforms of the kind reported in the book Reinventing Government, endorsed by those famous "tax protesters" Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and implemented throughout the world in cities like Indianapolis and Chicago, states like Virginia and Wisconsin, and in nations like New Zealand, Britain, Russia, and Peru. The intellectual spark for the reinventing movement derives in part from public choice economics and in part from other empirical and theoretical research.
As a matter of experience, however, we have learned that fiscal restraint is a condition precedent to reform, as well as being important to healthy economic growth. We therefore oppose higher general taxes at this time, although we do not necessarily oppose additional user fees or earmarked levies.
We support public employee incentive pay, agency decentralization, selective privatization, patient-centered health care reform, competitive contracting in highway maintenance, an end to government minimum prices on consumer products, stricter ethical constraints on legislators, local control of education, and a system of family choice of schools considerably more moderate than the much-reviled "voucher system." The common threads running through these proposals are (1) raising the quality of service provided for each dollar; (2) empowering the service consumer; (3) reducing conflicts of interest between government, taxpayer, and consumer; and (4) eliminating unfair privileges.
These positions are relatively uncontroversial in most of the country--indeed in most of the world. They are threatening only to antediluvians and to special interests. Unfortunately, Montana politics has more than its share of antediluvians and special interests.
Faculty salaries. Finally, Calvert complains of the salary level of Montana professors. As one of the lowest paid tenured law professors in the nation, I share his complaint. But two decades of constant frustration on pay issues should have taught Montana professors that the solution is not to be found in pulling harder in the tug-of-war between Montana taxpayers, public employees, and consumers. The solution is to be found through the kind of restructuring that will, to the extent humanly possible, bring all three constituencies over to the same side. In the context of the Montana University System, that means de-consolidation, campus-based governance, and sending state funds into resident student scholarships (to be used on Montana campuses) rather than through the board of regents.
Any readers wanting to learn more about Montanans for Better Government may contact us at 1113 Lincolnwood, Missoula, MT 59802, tel. 721-2266.
Sincerely yours,
Robert G. Natelson
Professor of Law
University of Montana-Missoula