Ohio now mandates that 10 principles of free market capitalism be taught in the high schools as part of the financial literacy curriculum. It’s a lesson that Ohio lawmakers should apply to themselves.
Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 17 into law Wednesday.
The key concepts of the bill are sound enough: raw materials, labor, and capital are privately owned. Individuals control their own ability to work. Markets set asset values. Profit is earned by providing goods or services of value.
The free market is driven by and tends to produce entrepreneurship and innovation, with the caveat that it sometime leads to market failures. Legal protection of property rights is essential to capitalism and societies that embrace free markets often have political and personal freedom as well. These are bedrock values of America’s free enterprise philosophy and they’re baked right into the founding documents.
Ohio law now stipulates that understanding these concepts is crucial to financial literacy. These views would carry more weight if Ohio government provided a better example of how capitalism should work in a free society.
Crony capitalism is a better description of the free market under Ohio lawmakers. Even after markets set the asset value for FirstEnergy’s nuclear power plants at a loss, the General Assembly in 2019 voted to approve a $1.3 billion bailout for the energy company after FirstEnergy flooded the election process with $61 million in political bribes. All to ensure FirstEnergy a profit.
The General Assembly’s approved principles of capitalism would call this “mitigation of side effects and market failures.”
The U.S. Department of Justice calls it an example of racketeering, since the corruption case was successfully prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. While the legislation requiring teaching of specific free market principles will benefit Ohio high school students, the General Assembly should be putting its own house in order.
Sitting waiting for consideration is House Bill 16, which would begin to reform Ohio government while closing the legal loopholes that give capitalism a bad name. Passage of H.B. 16 would help clean up government in Ohio and make it live by the principles it preaches.
First Published March 18, 2024, 5:57 p.m.
