The John Locke Foundation’s “City and County Issue Guide 2014” is now available. Actually, it has been available awhile, but I just got around to reading it. What I liked most was its insights on opportunity costs and supply-and-demand in political decisions.

Quotable quotes included:

Local policymakers should not offer some businesses subsidies and not others. Rather than forcing the growth of certain industries, they should allow consumer demand to determine how their communities will grow. With this approach, only the businesses that can profit in a city, without government aid, will remain in business. – Jon Sanders

The general public knows almost by instinct three essential and interrelated economic principles: competition, specialization, and bulk buying all save money. But these principles are often forgotten when it comes to providing city and county services. – Julie Gilstrap

Transportation is about providing mobility, not about reshaping the community or defining away the automobile, consumers’ mode of choice. Planners should build to serve people. – Jon Sanders

The consequences of poor transportation policy aren’t limited to creating frustrated commuters. Research finds traffic congestion harms an area’s economic growth. Traffic jams and even the expectation of congestion negatively affect productivity, employment, company profits, and consumer prices. – Jon Sanders

. . . This freedom is reflected in a well-known expression for being in control of a situation: to be in the driver’s seat. That is what people prefer, and that choice is what good transportation policy recognizes. – Jon Sanders

Deserving honorable mention are Sarah Curry’s observation that public recreation first crowds out private enterprises with the edge it gets from tax subsidy. Then, making things worse, taxes have to be raised somewhere else to compensate for the revenue stream the private enterprises would have generated. Curry disapproves of publicly funding narrow recreational interests, asking if government can make a lobby out of kickboxers, what’s next?

On the downside, the report is small, and as such, speaks in generalizations. Comparisons are broadbrush, and illustrations get that two-paragraph coverage that is bound to agitate people who have been following those issues for years.