I’m a conservative without a conversion story. Plenty of others have such a tale — they read a certain book, had a certain teacher, or somehow became disenchanted with their previous, left-leaning views.

If the conversion happened to them as adults, after first being politically active as a progressive, socialist, or communist, they were called neoconservatives. One of the most prominent, Irving Kristol, famously defined a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” and a neoliberal as “a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

I only got mugged once, while working as a magazine reporter in Washington, and I was already a conservative. It was an attempted mugging, actually, because I happened to be carrying a synthesizer in a heavy case, it proved to be a handy weapon to swing, and the would-be mugger was either drunk or stoned out of his mind.

But Kristol wasn’t really talking about crime as a political issue, of course, although the rise of criminality and social disorder during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was a factor that propelled some Americans into the modern conservative movement. What bound the disparate elements of that movement together was the existence of critically important and inescapable realities — such as what the free-market economist Thomas Sowell later described as the “constrained vision” of human nature, as distinguishable from the “unconstrained vision” of would-be social engineers.

Both here in North Carolina and around the country, the modern conservative movement is an alliance of what used to be called traditionalism and what used to be called liberalism. Traditionalists believed there are fundamental truths and virtues, either revealed by God or confirmed by millennia of human history, that ought to guide human action.

Classical liberals didn’t necessarily disagree with that premise, actually. But they elevated the principle of freedom to the top of the list — the right of individuals to make decisions for themselves above the power of the state to take their property and control their lives.

Traditionalists valued freedom, as well, but observed that individuals aren’t born as human atoms who later, voluntarily, form human molecules. We are born into families and communities, and thus into a thick and complex web of social obligations. Many traditionalists, then, defined freedom in communitarian terms, as “ordered liberty.” Classical liberals emphasized the right of the individual to make decisions, even if the results dismayed their neighbors or injured themselves.

When cultural critics, libertarians, and anti-communists forged the modern conservative movement in America during the 20th century, they were reacting to the threatening rise of populism, progressivism, and socialism. It was a case of longtime rivals, traditionalists and classical liberals, forming first an alliance of mutual need and then, through fits and starts, forging a more systematic integration of their ideas.

The result wasn’t a catechism. It was and remains messy and incomplete. There are areas of disagreement and differences in emphasis. But the various strands of modern conservatism have enough in common to work together — and what they have in common, for the most part, is a belief that governmental power should be minimized so that freedom can be maximized.

Why? Because it is in the nature of humans to thrive, in the long run, when they are free to make their own decisions, rather than being compelled to comply with some central plan. The empirical evidence for this proposition is massive and constantly growing.

For example, a recent peer-reviewed study by North Dakota State University economist Jeremy Jackson employed the Frasier Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America Index and a set of survey data on life satisfaction. All other things being equal, states with lower taxes, smaller budgets, and fewer regulations had a higher share of happy residents than did those with expansive, expensive governments.

My conservative colleagues and I here in North Carolina fight for freedom not as an abstraction but as a practical tool for promoting opportunity, progress, happiness, and virtue. And we welcome converts to the cause.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history.

When Morgan Reaves heard his sister Elizabeth chattering about the man she saw playing around atop Chimney Rock, he had plenty of reasons not to believe her. People just didn’t go climbing such steep cliffs, not in 1806 and certainly not for simple recreation. Morgan knew there wasn’t anything worth collecting on the small summit of the distinctive chimney-shaped rock in western North Carolina.

And Elizabeth was only eight years old. Morgan, age 11, was too grown-up and wise to believe the fairy tales of little children.

Still, whether driven by brotherly affection or something else, Morgan decided to walk across the field to Elizabeth and follow her gaze up to the Chimney Rock half a mile away. What he glimpsed there amazed him — not one man standing on the high ledge but masses of people flying around and above it.

Morgan’s shouts drew his older sister Polly, their mother, and a black woman (her name lost to history, alas) out of the nearby house. All saw the flying people, hundreds if not thousands of them, dressed in “brilliant white raiment,” as Mrs. Reaves later put it, rising from the trees to congregate at Chimney Rock. A few minutes later a neighbor, Robert Siercy, arrived. He saw the flyers, too, explaining later that the experience left him with “a solemn and pleasing impression on the mind, accompanied with a diminution of bodily strength.”

Who were these strange beings who possessed not only the ability to fly but also the power to influence the emotions of human spectators? Some believers called them angels. Skeptics called them “flocks of birds” or “a refraction or reflection of light from the vapor arising out of the side of the mountain.”

I just call them the makings of a great story. And since I shifted my authorial energies a couple of years ago from writing history books to writing fantasy novels, I’m always on the lookout for great stories to adapt — especially if they are set in North Carolina.

As I explained when my first novel, Mountain Folk, came out in 2021, my turn to speculative fiction was no midlife crisis or childish whim. Myth, fantasy, and science fiction play outsized roles in our culture. Millions of readers in America and around the world have been inspired by colorful tales of a legendary past, unnerved by bleak predictions of a dystopian future, or sobered by insightful explorations of human nature in which nonhumans often play the starring roles.

How many people have learned about the temptations of power not by reading political philosophy but by witnessing the One Ring corrupt their favorite J.R.R. Tolkien characters? How many take their models of courage and loyalty not from classic literature but from Harry Potter and his friends? How many have learned about fanaticism from Frank Herbert’s Dune, about totalitarianism from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, about freedom from Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and about sin, atonement, and faith from C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia?

I’m no world-class author like Tolkien, Lewis, or J.K. Rowling, of course, but I do aspire to impart timeless truths while giving my readers a fun and surprising excursion into American history and folklore. As a proud North Carolinian, I also make no excuses for featuring our state’s myths and legends in the pages of my Folklore Cycle of historical-fantasy stories, the latest of which is my just-released novel Forest Folk. It’s set in the early 1800s and depicts the War of 1812, the beginnings of the abolitionist movement, and the Trail of Tears.

It also depicts those white-clothed creatures flying over Chimney Rock in 1806, plus other Carolina landmarks such as the Underground Railroad Tree in Guilford County, the so-called Devil’s Tramping Ground in Chatham County, and the spot where the Haw and Deep rivers converge to form the Cape Fear River — a place once known as Mermaid Point.

Do any truths lurk beneath these legends? You’ll get no answer here. That would be telling.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history.

Climate change is real. Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities such as power generation and transportation are a causal factor. Because the net effects of climate change are likely to be harmful, governments should enact prudent policy responses.

So stipulated. Now, let me tell you why those responses won’t include stiff carbon taxes or other costly regulations. My reasoning begins with two statistical uses of the same number: $4 a gallon and 4% of global output.

The first number was roughly the average price of regular gasoline in North Carolina during the month of March, when general inflationary pressures and supply shocks from the Ukraine conflict conspired to deliver a big wallop to motorists. Prices moderated a bit in April but are still close to that $4 a gallon figure. By comparison, a gallon of regular gas averaged $2.63 in mid-March 2021.

The second number is roughly the best dollar-denominated estimate of the total net consequences of climate change if nothing is done to affect the trajectory of global temperatures by the year 2100. That’s 4% of the planet’s total output of goods and services, by the way. It includes the net effects of heat waves, sea-level rise, and other predicted calamities.

Here’s one way to think about this number. A United Nations panel projects that if present trends continue, average global incomes will rise about 450% from today to the end of the century. Apply the projected effects of climate change, and that increase in income falls to 436%. It’s a real and noticeable difference, reflecting the proposition that trapping more energy within the atmospheric system will impose net costs on most people.

However, a reduction in the growth of global living standards from 450% to 436% is nothing like the “existential crisis” some claim. It’s worth doing trying to head off if the cost of prevention is lower than the incremental harm of doing nothing. If the cost exceeds the benefit however, we’ll be healthier, wealthier, and happier if we focus our resources on adaptation instead of prevention.

Which brings me back to that first statistic. Right now, having to pay $4 for a gallon of gas is making most North Carolinians concerned, many of us really angry, and some truly desperate. In the latter case, I’m talking about people of modest means who have long commutes or small businesses for which transportation and delivery costs are a major expense.

Along with rents and grocery bills, increases in gas prices have propelled the inflation issue to the top of the priority list. During the last two weeks of March, the polling unit at High Point University asked North Carolina voters to rate a range of issues as “very important,” “somewhat important,” “not very important,” or “not at all important.” Not surprisingly, the highest-ranked issue was inflation, with 74% of respondents rating it very important. The two issues with the lowest ranking were climate change and the related subject of public transportation.

If there’s one thing a politician may read carefully and take to heart, it’s a poll. That’s why federal, state, and even local officials and candidates are promising to “do something” about inflation in general and gas prices in particular. And that’s why even Democratic governors who ran for office in other states promising to combat climate change are now pitching ideas such as suspending motor-fuels taxes, tapping oil reserves, and at least a temporary boost in oil production.

All this is happening with gas at $4 a gallon. Can you imagine the political fallout if the price were double or triple that?

By all means, let’s invest in research and development. We may get to widespread adoption of electric cars — fueled by some combination of nuclear, renewables, and natural gas — because their real price of operation comes down to a competitive level. But we aren’t going to get there by carbon taxes or some other coercive means. The public will never go for it.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Most states have still failed to recover the jobs lost during the depths of the COVID crisis in 2020. North Carolina is not, however, one of those states.

From February 2020 to February 2022, we experienced an employment increase of 1.5%, representing a net gain 67,600 jobs. That ranks us 6th in job growth since the onset of COVID. Only 10 other states are in positive territory over the past two years: Utah (5.1%), Idaho (5.1%), Montana (3.1%), Texas (1.7%), Florida (1.7%), Arizona (1.3%), Georgia (1.2%), Tennessee (1.2%), Arkansas (0.9%), and Colorado (0.3%).

If we measure the recovery not by employment but by overall output, our state still fares well. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, North Carolina’s real GDP has grown by an annualized average of 1.7% since the start of 2020, faster than the Southeast (1.1%) and the nation as a whole (0.8%).

There’s no question our state suffered mightily during the COVID crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people lost jobs or incomes. Millions suffered unprecedented restrictions on their personal liberty. And more than 23,000 of our fellow North Carolinians lost their lives.

Whatever you think of the public-health benefits of the stringent executive orders Gov. Roy Cooper imposed during the first few months of the COVID crisis, they certainly had a substantial dampening effect on the state’s economy. I assume the governor would grant the existence of such a downside, arguing that achieving North Carolina’s lower-than-average death rates was worth the cost. Others might question whether the state’s mandates were really the main cause of those lower death rates.

As an economic matter, though, North Carolina clearly bounced back more strongly from the COVID recession than most states did. Why? I’ll offer three possible (and not mutually exclusive) explanations.

First, our state and local governments were comparatively well-prepared. During much of the past decade, lawmakers had prudently increased state savings while making North Carolina a more attractive place to work, invest, and create jobs by reforming our tax code, regulatory process, and infrastructure programs. These policy decisions served as the equivalent of a giant neon sign with the words “Do Business Here!” and a giant arrow pointing to North Carolina.

So even as some industries were swooning — and some businesses such as downtown restaurants were closing their doors for good — other industries were in a position to expand once the worst of the crisis was over. They were already in place in North Carolina, or looking closely at the state for their next major investments.

A second explanation might be that our economy’s exposure to a pandemic-induced downturn was somewhat lower than those of our peers because of differences in structure. A smaller share of our population lives in urban centers, for example. And tourism, while an important part of North Carolina’s service sector, doesn’t make up as large a share of GDP as it does in, say, our neighbor South Carolina.

Finally, our state has what many households and businesses are looking for in COVID’s aftermath. Remote work has finally come into its own, freeing up some workers to choose homes and communities based on quality of life rather than proximity to downtown employment districts. While cross-state relocations don’t yet constitute a flood by historical standards, North Carolina is one of the most popular destinations for those looking to reinvent themselves — and their businesses — in more a more-congenial clime.

To say North Carolina is bouncing back is not to say everyone is coming along for the bouncy ride. Too many displaced workers remain on the sidelines of the labor market. Beyond a couple dozen urban and suburban counties, many other parts of the state continue to face major economic-development challenges. Furthermore, increased reliance on remote work brings costs as well as benefits. Some restaurants and service businesses catering to office workers may turn out to be unsustainable in their current form.

Nevertheless, things could be worse. In most the country, in fact, they are.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Over the past decade, North Carolina’s tax code has undergone a dramatic transformation. Once rated by the Tax Foundation as having one of the nation’s worst business-tax climates, our state now has one of the best. Our top marginal tax rate on personal income, once the highest in the Southeast at 7.75%, is now 4.99%. Our corporate tax rate, also once the region’s highest at 6.9%, is now 2.5%.

Because lawmakers didn’t just cut tax rates but reformed the system itself — broadening some tax bases while restructuring others — North Carolina has continued to experience healthy revenue growth. Indeed, despite repeated and panicky predictions of shortfalls by progressives, the state’s revenue has generally exceeded its (wisely conservative) revenue forecasts, giving it the capacity to fund its core services while shoring up its savings reserves to guard against future budget crises.

So far, so good. But what should policymakers do next? There’s a range of possible answers.

Under the state budget plan enacted last year and signed by Gov. Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s personal income tax rate will drop to 3.99% by 2027 and its corporate rate will phase out entirely by 2029. Some Republican lawmakers want to speed up those rate reductions. Others want to get rid of the personal income tax entirely, while still others want to do the same with North Carolina’s franchise tax, an outdated system that taxes firms doing business in the state based not on their net income but on their net worth. To offset expected revenue losses from these tax reductions, there is talk of ridding the income tax code of most remaining credits and carve-outs, or of expanding the sales tax to additional services sold at retail such as accounting, legal advice, and medical care.

On the Democratic side, Gov. Roy Cooper and his legislative allies would roll back most of the tax cuts of the last decade if they could. In particular, Cooper would dearly love to save the corporate tax — and, indeed, to raise its rate substantially on most businesses while retaining the ability to offer generous incentives to politically favored companies. Unless something very surprising happens this November, however, these Democratic fantasies will remain just that.

Speaking of political realities, North Carolina made a fateful decision long ago to fund public schools and roads primarily with state taxes rather than local ones. So what most other Americans pay for with their property taxes, North Carolinians pay for with income, sales, and gas taxes. Republicans need to keep that in mind as they fashion their tax-reform priorities.

North Carolina’s personal income tax is projected to raise $14.3 billion during the fiscal year that ends this June. The state sales tax is projected to raise $9.6 billion, the corporate tax $1.1 billion, and the franchise tax $840 million.

Given continued spending discipline and even moderate revenue growth, we can do away with the corporate tax as scheduled, or even accelerate the phase-out, without imperiling core services. Pursuing other ambitious reforms, however, will require tough choices.

For North Carolina to join the likes of Florida, Tennessee, and Texas in abolishing income taxes altogether, for example, we’d either have to more than double our sales tax collections (likely by taxing most services at high rates), require local governments to raise property or sales taxes drastically to take on new funding responsibilities, or some combination of the two.

Well, okay, I omitted two more options. One is to assume that the economic growth induced by abolishing our income tax would producing offsetting sales taxes at current rates. That’s mathematically impossible. The other is to cut General Fund spending in half. That’s politically impossible.

I’m in favor of additional pro-growth tax cuts such as slashing capital-gains taxes and pulling business-to-business transactions out of the retail sales tax (they were never retail sales in the first place). Still, our highest priority should be to protect the tax cuts already enacted and scheduled. Not very exciting, perhaps, but prudent.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

It’s an often-repeated tale, I admit, but I’m going to repeat it, again: the world’s largest low-rise office building, the Pentagon, was built in 16 months. Can you imagine a project even a tenth the size of the Pentagon being constructed that quickly today?

It’s true the 16-month period in question — from the September 11, 1941 groundbreaking to the January 15, 1943 completion date — didn’t include planning time. Can you guess how long the planning took?

Here’s the sequence of events. At a July 17, 1941 hearing on Capitol Hill, U.S Rep. Clifton Woodrum of Virginia pressed the Roosevelt administration to come up with an “overall solution” to the War Department’s longstanding office crunch. At the time, its employees were spread out over 17 separate buildings in the nation’s capital.

Keep in mind that by this point in World War II, the United States had not officially entered the conflict. But America was already a major supplier of materiel to both Britain and the Soviet Union, and was imposing stiff economic sanctions on Japan in response to its invasion of, and atrocities within, the vast expanse of China. U.S. officials knew full well (even if the general public did not) that the country might soon be drawn into war. Among their concerns was the readiness of the War Department to manage any rapid and massive mobilization that might be required.

Within days of the July 17 hearing, then, the department responded with a plan to build a new headquarters just over the Potomac River at Arlington Farms. Because of the site’s irregular shape, planners chose the now-distinctive pentagon design. On July 28 — you read that right — Congress authorized funding for the project.

The department’s plan drew immediate objections. Neighbors, activists, and civic leaders complained that even though the planned building would be only five stories tall, it might block the view from Arlington National Cemetery to Washington. After several weeks of wrangling, President Roosevelt sided with the critics and chose a different location, a former airport, for the Pentagon.

Unlike modern land-use disputes of comparable acrimony, however, this one didn’t gum up the works too much. Though the final site hadn’t been officially designated, the War Department spent the summer selecting its vendors and identifying the additional parcels of land it would need to buy around each of the alternative sites. On the same day the construction contract was designed, September 11, work on the Pentagon began.

I can’t tell you the next 16 months always went smoothly. The contractors encountered unexpected problems. Sometimes the construction crews got ahead of the evolving designs. The project blew past its original budget. And although the 16 months of construction may seem lightning fast to us, department officials actually found it frustratingly slow. They had to move some employees into the Pentagon as it was still being completed — when some of the “hallways” were really just wooden planks laid across construction pits.

There’s no such emergency in North Carolina right now. But the example of the Pentagon, and of other construction projects of the era, can be seen as evidence of the proposition that when public agencies and private contractors have sufficient means and motivation, they can act with dispatch.

Can we all agree that it simply takes too long today to plan, permit, design, and complete major public-works projects? There are roads I regularly travel where orange barrels have become a seemingly permanent feature. The cost in dollars, traffic, and frustration are immense.

Now that the national Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation has stalled out, I suggest North Carolina leaders expropriate two-thirds of the slogan to name a new bipartisan initiative: a Build Back Faster bill. Let’s get serious about streamlining state regulations and permitting processes so that public buildings, roads, sewer lines, and other infrastructure can be completed in a reasonable time.

Do that, ladies and gentlemen, and you’ll get a big round of applause. It’ll be well deserved.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Although the definition and priorities of American conservatism have been the subject of much debate among the chattering classes in recent years, most actual American conservatives will readily tell you what unifies their sometimes-raucous ranks: freedom.

Consider the latest political typology produced by the Pew Research Center. Assembling hundreds of survey responses and then looking for clusters of like-minded voters, Pew came up with nine discrete groups — four on the Right, four on the Left, and a group in the middle, “Stressed Sideliners,” whose swings back and forth often determine electoral outcomes.

The four right-of-center groups — Committed Conservatives, Faith & Flag Conservatives, the Populist Right, and the Ambivalent Right — exhibit notable differences in demographics, political engagement, and views on specific issues. What draws them together as a coalition, however, is their preference for individual freedom and voluntary solutions over government paternalism and compulsion.

Pew asked respondents, for example, whether “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals” or “government should do more to solve problems.” The Committed Conservatives (87%), Faith & Flag Conservatives (88%), Populist Right (77%), and Ambivalent Right (67%) picked the first response. The four left-leaning groups picked the second response by comparably large majorities.

Similarly, the right-leaning groups all favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” while the left-leaning groups preferred “a bigger government providing more services.” And while the conservatives agreed “it’s not the government’s job to protect people from themselves,” the progressives said “sometimes laws to protect people from themselves are necessary.”

Yes, some conservatives deviate from the general principle in specific cases. Some progressives do, too. Humans are messy creatures who create complicated problems that resist easy solutions. But that doesn’t mean we’re all an indistinguishable mass when it comes to political behavior. For some, our strongest impulse is for government, an inherently coercive institution, to butt out of our private affairs and decisions. For others, the strongest impulse is to butt in.

These differences help to explain why the conservative movement tends to evaluate its progress with measurements of freedom. Here in North Carolina, my colleagues and I at the John Locke Foundation look at state-by-state rankings to gauge how far we’ve come — and how far we still have to go.

One popular metric is the Fraser Institute’s annual Economic Freedom of North America study, which integrates information on taxes, regulations, expenditures, and related concerns. Using the most-recent data available, for 2018, North Carolina ranks 10th in economic freedom. On the Tax Foundation’s narrower measure of the “tax costs for doing business,” North Carolina ranks 3rd best for new firms and 5th for mature ones.

In the latest edition of the Cato Institute’s sprawling study Freedom in the 50 States, North Carolina’s best rankings are in labor freedom (11th) and educational freedom (6th). Speaking of which, North Carolina ranks 10th in funding for school-choice programs and 8th in the share of elementary and secondary students enrolled in schools other than those run by districts, which are a useful proxy for the extent of freedom and competition in education.

When conservatives see such results, we’re heartened but hardly satisfied. For North Carolina to move into the top five in economic freedom, for instance, state lawmakers will have to do more to deregulate our health care system, insurance markets, and occupational licensing. When it comes to personal freedom, North Carolina is egregiously out of step when it comes to gambling (45th in the Cato study) and alcohol (40th), the latter of which suggests we ought to sell our government-owned ABC stores.

Those last two examples illustrate the larger point. I would never deny that addictions to gambling and alcohol can be disastrous. I simply believe such problems are best combatted by families, friends, and religious communities, not by state compulsion. Some conservatives disagree. They see these issues as exceptions to the general rule.

So the debate continues — but not about that general rule, you see. Not about the primacy of freedom. It remains the primary dividing line between Left and Right.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

If ever there was justification for sudden, expedited, large-scale federal expenditure, the COVID crisis was it. Americans faced a deadly pandemic. Governmental responses to it — some prudent, others panicky — had suppressed mobility, economic activity, and even basic personal freedoms to an unprecedented degree. Some federal relief was necessary.

As is now clear, however, Congress and two different presidential administrations flubbed the federal response the COVID crisis. They borrowed and spent far too much money, often in haphazard and ineffective ways, with too few safeguards against abuse. If your preferred approach to public policy assumes that federal officials have the capacity or incentives to make wise and precisely timed interventions, it’s time to rethink your position.

The sheer scale of Washington’s COVID response boggles the mind. From the early days of the pandemic to the inaccurately named American Rescue Plan of 2021, the federal government authorized $5.7 trillion in spending. Some of the money was sent directly to taxpayers or expended by federal agencies. Other funds were directed to state and local governments or administered by banks and other private firms.

Because the federal budget was already wildly out of balance before the crisis began, all this new federal spending was simply added to the national debt. Deficits that had been projected at a bit over $1 trillion a year turned into a $3 trillion deficit in 2020 and elevated deficits for the next few years. According to Manhattan Institute senior fellow Brian Riedl, the national debt had been projected to rise from $17 trillion before the pandemic to about $29 trillion by the end of the decade (largely as a result of expenditure growth in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which comprise most of the federal budget). Now, the best estimate is that the debt will reach $36 trillion by the end of the decade.

Although plenty of people have tried to hoodwink themselves into believing such massive fiscal imbalances don’t matter, reality can’t be fooled. The rebirth of inflation as a serious economic and political problem is no coincidence. Nor it is just a fleeting effect of a few logistical bottlenecks. It’s the inevitable result of too much money chasing too few goods — of “stimulus” checks thrown about with reckless abandon, of the Federal Reserve monetizing the surging debt, and of labor shortages that had their origins in the perverse incentives of federal handouts.

During the early stages of COVID, it made sense to use the unemployment-insurance system to cushion the blow to displaced workers, especially because so many job losses were the result of shutdown orders by governments. Predictably, though, policymakers expanded the program’s funding and eligibility too much and for too long.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Matt Weidinger has pointed out, one consequence was massive UI fraud. Of the nearly $900 billion in UI payments during the height of COVID, around $163 billion were paid improperly, either through mistakes or outright fraud. Something similar happened with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what used to be called food stamps. According to Weidinger’s AEI colleague Angela Rachidi, cash redemptions of SNAP benefits at retail stores shot up by $22 billion in 2020. “More benefits flowing through retailers will mean more SNAP benefits trafficked,” Rachidi wrote.

Here in North Carolina, there’s abundant evidence of another serious flaw with the federal government’s COVID relief packages: they gave states and localities far more (borrowed) federal funds than were needed to address their real fiscal or public-health needs. The city of Raleigh, for example, received $73 million. John Locke Foundation analyst Paige Terryberry reported that as of late March, Raleigh has allocated only 3% of that total. Other North Carolina cities and counties have spent a bit more of their largesse, but often on items or projects with little relevance to the COVID crisis and its aftermath.

The federal government’s fiscal response to COVID was excessive, poorly targeted, and badly administered. Its costs will burden us for many years to come.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

As post-COVID shifts in work arrangements and living preferences continue to motivate many Americans to relocate, North Carolina will continue to be a popular destination. Indeed, we can attract even more professionals, families, retirees, and other folks to our state if we lean into one of our competitive advantages: housing options.

If you’ve been following local housing markets lately, my talk of our housing-option “advantage” may sound hollow to you. What options?

Yes, Inventory is tight. Consequently, prices have skyrocketed in many North Carolina communities. This is a national trend, however, and housing prices have shot up even faster in other destination states. Comparatively, living in North Carolina is still a bargain. Of the 10 states that experienced the largest numerical gains in population last year, including North Carolina (#4), our state has the lowest ratio of housing costs to the national average.

That’s only for now, though. Unless we make it easier for homebuilders to keep up with demand — and, in particular, with demand for the kind of homes that consumers want to buy — North Carolina’s edge will disappear. Does that mean building more single-family homes in the outer suburbs of fast-growing metropolitan areas? Or preparing our smaller cities and towns to attract the growing ranks of work-from-home households? Or loosening restrictions that keep high-density condos, apartments, and accessory dwelling units from alleviating the housing crunch in urban cores?

Yes! It means all of the above. While most buyers, both relocators and new homeowners alike, seem to prefer the suburbs — despite decades of hectoring from “Smart Growth” scolds — policymakers ought to accommodate a range of options.

Consider the case of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), sometimes called “granny flats.” Whether added to already occupied lots as freestanding homes or by converting attics, basements, and garages into rentable apartments, ADUs represent a challenge to traditional zoning codes. Some North Carolina cities have tried to accommodate them. Others haven’t. The latter really ought to reconsider. ADUs obviously aren’t for everyone, of course, but they can fill a gap in the market for young people, seniors, and others who prioritize affordability and location over square footage.

In a recent article for The Independent Review, Duke University professor Michael Munger spelled out the underlying math of the problem. In places with burdensome regulation and high land prices, the cost of building new housing units can exceed $250 per square foot.

“For a 1,000-square-foot apartment,” Munger wrote, “a developer would need to charge at least $2,750 per month just to break even. Now, the usual definition of ‘affordable’ is housing that costs 30 percent or less of the renter’s income. But let’s expand that, and call 40 percent of income affordable. A worker would still need a pretax annual salary of $75,000 to be able to afford our hypothetical minimally legal new apartment.”

Even in a less-regulated market, developers may well have a financial incentive to target new construction to households with higher-than-average incomes. That can still ease the housing crunch for everyone else, though, because many customers buying the new housing stock will be vacating existing homes in the market, thus freeing up supply for other buyers.

My colleagues at the John Locke Foundation have long advocated regulatory reform as a means of promote housing affordability across the Tar Heel State. “Planners, policymakers, and other concerned citizens want more affordable housing options and less traffic congestion,” senior fellow Jon Sanders wrote in a 2019 paper. “But instead of more regulation, the way to bring those things about more effectively may be less restrictive land-use and other regulations. With fewer government obstacles and more freedom to operate, people can respond to market needs more quickly and in a greater variety of ways.”

North Carolina leaders have enacted many pro-growth policies over the years. That’s one reason people keeping moving here in droves. To keep our good thing going, we need to make it easier for private industry to deliver the housing options their customers want.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

How should North Carolina be governed? The same question can be asked about any other state in America, or any other country in the world. It’s a critical question. It lies at the heart of every political dispute you can think of, from education reform and environmental protection to tax policy and economic development.

I have strong opinions about the subject. Perhaps you do, too. My task today is not to advocate mine or criticize yours. Rather, it is to argue for humility.

Questions about how good governments are structured and what they should do aren’t mere abstractions. They have a history. Past generations thought about them, struggled with them, and tried out different answers to see how they would work in practice.

Obviously, past generations have no monopoly on wisdom. They made big mistakes and often paid a big price for it. To say that history ought to inform our political thinking today is not to say we must be bound by tradition. But it would also be foolish to think modern wisdom is always greater, or to discount the lessons history can teach us about the constraints of human nature and the limits of good intentions.

Over the centuries, North Carolinians have developed governmental institutions and traditions that favor legislative over executive power, statewide consistency over local sovereignty, and fiscal solvency over grandiose plans. These preferences aren’t random or the product of some insidious scheme by corrupt insiders. They were constructed in stages, as the leaders of the day sought either to solve immediate problems in North Carolina or to avoid problems other states had gotten themselves into.

During the colonial era, for example, North Carolina was largely settled from north to south, not from the coast westward. Many settlers were fleeing what they saw as oppressive laws or unjust taxes. Many of my ancestors, for example, were Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and other dissenters whose religious liberties were being suppressed by the established church in Virginia.

During the mid-1700s, they moved southward to the Carolina frontier. Eventually, the long arms of colonial governors found them even there, and again sought to interfere with their desire to conduct their own marriages, educate their children according to their own beliefs, and keep their own money. The backcountry rebelled. In the ensuing series of state constitutions, North Carolinians made sure to keep the executive branch divided and on a tight leash.

Much later, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, leaders grappled with a different challenge: how to ensure that basic services were provided across North Carolina, both economically and without disruption. Many localities had run up large debts and then defaulted on them. Through their lawmakers, they sought state bailouts. Meanwhile, how were courts, schools, and roads to be maintained?

Lawmakers decided to make the state the primary funder of basic services, while limiting local capacity to issue future debts. Taxpayers would pay the bill either way, of course, but a state-dominant funding system reduces inequities and manages risk.

These and other traditions of North Carolina government are hardly free from legitimate criticism. I’ve challenged them myself on occasion. But they aren’t simply vestigial. If we thoughtlessly perform a constitutional appendectomy, we may rudely discover in the future that we’ve discarded something vitally important.

Georgetown University philosopher Daniel Robinson once used a wonderful image to describe the present value of studying the past. Remember the story of Theseus and the Minotaur? The former resolves to end the latter’s reign of terror over the Athenians. But the Minotaur resides in a labyrinth on Crete. Ariadne, a Cretan princess who loves Theseus, gives him a ball of thread. The hero ties the thread to a door post and lets it unspool so he can find his way out again after killing the beast.

North Carolina faces a range of challenges and opportunities. As we make our way through the resulting maze of choices, we may yet find value in tradition’s thread.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

It costs a lot more to train a future engineer than to train a future journalist. Some smart aleck might suggest the cost differential is entirely understandable, since a poorly trained engineer will tend to wash out of her profession while a poorly trained journalist might well rise to the top of his.

Since my undergraduate degree was in journalism, I will not be that smart aleck.

What I will suggest, however, is that policymakers pay greater attention to the full cost — not just the net price — of obtaining college degrees. A new study coauthored by UNC-Chapel Hill professor Steven Hemelt offers some useful insights about the issue.

Hemelt and his colleagues pulled 17 years of data from a national survey of instructional costs across public and private institutions. Focusing on 20 major fields of study that collectively account for most student enrollments, they found large differences in instructional costs. Courses in electrical engineering, for example, cost an average of $434 per credit hour. Courses in communications and media averaged $185 per credit hour.

While other technical disciplines such as nursing ($375 an hour), mechanical engineering ($372), physics ($281), and computer science ($274) also had higher-than-average costs, the researchers found that the need to outfit classrooms with high-tech equipment does not explain much of the variance in instructional costs. The key factors are how much professors and instructors are paid and how many students are in their classes.

Yes, it’s often more expensive for universities to recruit teachers in technical fields for which there are lucrative alternatives such as private industry or research labs. Individuals with math, science, or economics degrees can often make more outside of the academy than inside it, while the same cannot necessarily be said for those with degrees in education, history, or English.

But that’s not the only consideration. While professors in economics, political science, and business departments receive relatively high salaries, their instructional costs per credit hour come in closer to the middle of the pack because their classes are relatively large.

Education professors and instructors, for example, make an average of $80,340 a year while their counterparts in economics departments make $123,720. In terms of instructional cost per credit hour, however, education degrees are more expensive ($291) than economics degrees ($218). That’s because economics classes tend to be significantly bigger than education classes. In engineering and nursing programs, however, classes must necessarily be smaller, so their higher professor salaries translate into higher costs per student.

Hemelt and his coauthors also looked at trends over time. While real instructional costs as a whole didn’t rise much from 2000 to 2017, there was, again, considerable variation. In some high-demand STEM fields, costs per credit hour actually went down quite a bit as enrollments surged and universities chose to increase class sizes or hire part-time adjuncts rather than bring on a proportionate number of costlier tenure-track professors. On the other hand, in such fields as history, sociology, education, and the arts, instructional costs per student credit hour have gone up.

How about online instruction? So far, the researchers discovered, it hasn’t really moved the needle. “We find some evidence that an increase in the share of undergraduate coursework completed online is related to lower salary costs,” they wrote. “But estimates for the other cost drivers suggest that any short-run cost savings on salaries are offset by smaller class sizes and an uptick in non-personnel expenditures.”

The cost of a given program is, of course, only one side of the ledger. What are the benefits? I think we can all agree that producing well-educated, highly trained, and innovative engineers is worth a significant investment of time and money. For other disciplines, though, high and rising instructional costs are harder to justify.

Inevitably, universities will respond by increasing class sizes and making greater use of adjuncts. And non-academic institutions will respond by offering alternative means of teaching and certifying job skills. Both responses make sense to me.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The North Carolina General Assembly is going to stay in Republican hands after the 2022 midterms. For state Democrats, this is a bitter pill to swallow. That they’ve already managed to swallow it, however, is evident in their manifest failure to recruit enough candidates to put up a credible fight this year for control of the legislature.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Having convinced themselves that the Republicans’ 2010 victory was a fluke, and subsequent GOP majorities merely the consequence of gerrymandered districts, Democrats pinned their hopes for political recovery on challenging Republican-drawn districts in court. They prevailed multiple times. In the most recent case, a challenge to districts drawn by the GOP-led legislature last year, the Democratic-majority Supreme Court ordered new maps.

The legislative districts are, indeed, more conducive to a potential Democratic comeback. However, the plaintiffs and their financiers were deluding themselves all along. Their predicament was always about more than gerrymandering.

I’m a longtime advocate of redistricting reform. Under Democratic and Republican legislatures alike, I argued that North Carolina voters deserved a fairer and more competitive set of electoral districts. (That’s the right way to think about it, by the way: districts should be drawn to serve voters, not politicians.)

I argued that we needed to place binding constraints on gerrymandering in our state constitution, via a public referendum. The plaintiffs made a rather different, and to my mind rather unpersuasive, claim: that such binding constraints were already in the constitution, hidden in plain sight for hundreds of years behind such broadly worded phrases as “free elections” and “equal protection” and “freedom of speech.”

Well, the plaintiffs got their way. They convinced four Democratic justices to execute a retroactive rewrite of North Carolina’s constitution. They even convinced the justices to require the use of voting history and other political data in drawing legislative districts, despite the fact that our bipartisan redistricting-reform coalition had long fought to reduce the use of such information when drawing maps.

They got their way, yes, but not what they really wanted. As my John Locke Foundation colleague Andy Jackson points out, Democrats have failed even to recruit candidates for 41 of the state’s 170 legislative districts. While some of these unchallenged seats are safely Republican, Democrats left 11 potentially competitive seats on the table, seven in the House and four in the Senate.

These aren’t 50-50 seats, I grant you. They lean Republican, either slightly or moderately. But these are precisely the sort of districts that Democrats would have to win to regain their legislative majorities given the way Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning voters are distributed across urban, suburban, and rural areas. Indeed, these are precisely the sort of districts that Republicans had to win in 2010 to take control of the General Assembly in the first place.

For Democrats, the last decade of conservative governance in Raleigh has been brutal. Policy ideas they’d long deemed unthinkable or even dangerous — such as school vouchers, sweeping tax cuts, deregulation, and an end to forced annexation — became law. Democrats predicted disaster. It didn’t come. By most measures, North Carolina is doing well.

Yes, Republicans held the governor’s office for just four of those years. But Roy Cooper’s narrow victory over Pat McCrory in 2016 served merely to narrow the GOP’s scope of power somewhat. In our state, the General Assembly is the predominant branch of government. Although Cooper can use his veto to block new Republican initiatives, he can’t reverse conservative policies or pursue progressive ones without passing bills.

Democrats struggled to recruit credible candidates in many races this year, and any candidates at all in dozens of other races, for two interrelated reasons. First, the party’s national brand is in tatters — shredded by inflation, by Biden’s ignominious flight from Afghanistan, and by unpopular stands on policing and schooling. Second, Democrats have devised no compelling rationale for booting Republicans out of power in the state legislature.

So they’re not going to, not anytime soon.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

There’s always a cost to protecting property rights. No rational person has ever suggested otherwise. In free societies that place a high value on the individual right to own and control private property, it’s more expensive for governments to build roads or public facilities. It’s harder to piece together parcels of land for redevelopment. And what your neighbors choose to do with their property may annoy you.

These costs are well worth paying, however, because the alternative is a more stagnant and stultifying society. If you’re unsure whether some future politician or bureaucrat might confiscate your property, or diminish its value through capricious regulation, you’re less likely to invest significant resources it. You’re less likely to take chances. You’re less free to live as you choose. These are significant costs, as well.

An underappreciated accomplishment over the past decade is that North Carolina’s protection of property rights has gotten a lot stronger. Still, each leap forward drew passionate critics.

When in 2012 the General Assembly essentially did away with forced annexation, critics predicted dire economic and financial consequences for cities and towns. When the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the state’s nearly 30-year-old Map Act in 2016, critics predicted that having to compensate people in the path of future roads for government restrictions on the use of their land would make road-building inefficient and unwieldy.

Neither objection held water, in my view. North Carolina’s annexation and road-corridor regulations were wildly out of step with those of most other states, where somehow municipalities and highway departments managed to deliver their services without relying on unjust laws.

Our latest leap forward in property-rights protections came in December. But neither state lawmakers nor state judges are responsible. It came from a federal court, in response to a case involving a homeless shelter in North Wilkesboro.

The Catherine H. Barber Memorial Shelter opened its doors in the Wilkes County town more than three decades ago. When board members expressed a need for a larger space to accommodate the growing needs of the shelter, a local dentist and his wife stepped up to donate the two-story office building that had previously housed his practice.

Barber Shelter officials were delighted — until the local zoning board denied its application for a conditional-use permit, citing a potential loss of property value among neighboring parcels as well as an alleged threat to public health because of the shelter’s location on a busy highway.

Rather than take the rejection on the chin, the Barber Shelter took the zoning board to court. Represented by the Institute for Justice’s Diana Simpson, the shelter argued that other, similarly situated businesses would have received permits to operate in the same location. U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth Bell agreed, writing in his order that the board “apparently believes — incorrectly — that it can say the magic words ‘traffic and safety’ and this Court will rubber stamp the classification no matter the facts.”

Examining those facts, Bell concluded that “North Wilkesboro intentionally treated the Shelter differently from other similarly situated uses, and there is no rational basis for the difference in treatment.” While there are certainly circumstances in which courts should defer to the informed judgment of administrative agencies, he wrote, “such deference cannot be an excuse for the Court to abdicate its duty to protect the constitutional rights of all people.”

To their credit, the town manager and North Wilkesboro Board of Commissioners decided not to appeal and will pay $180,000 in attorney fees. Indeed, Mayor Marc Hauser went out of his way to be supportive. “The Catherine Barber shelter provides a much-needed service for the less fortunate,” he said. “Personally, I would like to see them expand their hours and offer more services. Here’s wishing them all the best in their new facility.”

So the Barber Shelter is relocating as planned. And local officials in North Carolina and beyond got a clear message: infringing on property rights may be costly — for you.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I promise I’m no math geek. So why do my columns about North Carolina politics and public policy so often feature rankings, economic data, or other statistics?

Because if you’re going to write seriously about these topics, you’ve got to pay attention to numbers. While we tend to form our deepest political convictions in response to upbringing, relationships, and emotionally compelling stories, we often decide what we think about a specific issue, and especially how pressing we think it is, in response to statistical claims made by political actors.

Are the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Do conservatively governed states grow faster than progressively governed states? Is North Carolina one of the stingiest places in the country when it comes to paying teachers? Is the University of North Carolina system floundering or improving?

These are clearly matters of intense public interest in our state. They are also empirical claims. They can’t be evaluated based on anecdotes or political slogans.

We’re all prone to cognitive biases, of course, including the tendency to select as valid the statistical evidence that confirms our prior beliefs while ignoring or denigrating any statistical evidence to the contrary. That we all feel this temptation is not, however, a good reason to revert to bumper-sticker nostrums and mutual contempt. It’s a good reason to read widely, study carefully, and engage constructively.

If you sincerely hope to persuade others that their factual claims are mistaken, you have to be open to the risk that your factual claims may turn out to be mistaken. No need to worry, though. You don’t have to surrender your core beliefs to entertain this possibility — because, let’s face it, your core beliefs probably weren’t formed by a statistical claim in the first place!

Consider the case of economic mobility. Virtually everyone believes it should be easier for people born into poverty to work their way out of it. Disagreements arise when we get more specific about the extent of the problem, its primary causes, and the best ways to remedy them.

Eight years ago, the findings of a new academic study set off a firestorm in North Carolina’s largest city. Researchers found that among the nation’s 50 most-populous metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked precisely 50th in economic mobility. Shocked, local leaders responded with meetings and task forces and new initiatives. More broadly, as North Carolina took a rightward turn under a GOP-controlled General Assembly, critics often pointed to Charlotte’s dead-last ranking as evidence that too many folks in our state were still being left behind.

Well, the study was later updated and refined. Thanks to fantastic reporting on its findings by local radio station WFAE, we have a much-clearer sense of what the data really show about economic mobility — and why its measurement is so complicated. Mobility remains a real problem, of course. But Charlotte (and, by implication, North Carolina as a whole) should never have been labeled as last in the nation in mobility. By some measures, it’s closer to the average.

For example, when measuring income disparities or mobility or growth over time, should we focus on individual income or household income? The original mobility study focused on the latter. It’s understandable — we all live in a household, after all, whether it be a single-person household or a married couple with many children.

Still, if you divide income by households rather than by persons and then track the figures over time, your measure won’t just reflect changes in income received. It will also reflect changes in family structure. If a married couple is earning $50,000 and then divorces, you go from one $50,000 household to two households with average earnings of $25,000. A 50% drop in average income? Kinda, but such a claim is very easy to misinterpret.

When it comes to measuring complex realities, there will never be a single set of statistics that everyone accepts as gospel. We’re going to keep arguing about them. I look forward to it.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Over the past couple of weeks, North Carolina politicos have focused intently on the outcome of the state’s latest redistricting saga. After the GOP-majority General Assembly saw its original set of electoral districts thrown out by the courts, lawmakers tried again. Their new legislative maps were accepted. A three-judge panel rejected the Republicans’ newly crafted congressional districts, however, and enacted a “remedial” map for the 2022 cycle.

As all this was going on, however, average North Carolinians were paying closer attention to events unfolding thousands of miles away.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a tragedy, an outrage, and a wake-up call about the continued threat to liberty and order posed by dictators pursuing 19th-century aims with 21st-century arms. Here in North Carolina, it also represents a potential inflection point in our midterm elections.

This became clear on February 26 when three Republican candidates — former Gov. Pat McCrory, former U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, and Marjorie Eastman, an Army veteran and businesswoman — faced off in the first televised debate of the U.S. Senate primary. Held at the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Liberty Conference in Raleigh, the debate made statewide headlines not only because of what the participants said but also because of the identity of their frequent target, U.S. Rep. Ted Budd.

He wasn’t there. He declined the invitation, saying he wouldn’t agree even to discuss a GOP debate until the candidate-filing period closed. Event organizers put a lectern on the stage to underline his absence.

With the Russian invasion occurring in real time, Budd’s decision not to participate proved costly. The congressman is vulnerable on the issue. In the past, he sometimes voted against bills to sanction Russia for its conduct in Ukraine. More recently, Budd was in the audience when former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Budd, called Vladimir Putin “pretty smart” for launching his current invasion of Russia’s southern neighbor.

The day before the Senate debate, McCrory formally filed for the office and told reporters that Budd had been “defending Russia and defending Putin when it’s indefensible.” During the debate, McCrory and the other participants doubled down on the subject. Eastman called the dictator a “thug” and his invasion “unprovoked and unjustified.” Walker argued that the U.S. and its allies ought to “go after Putin directly.”

Asked later to respond, Budd told CBS-17 that Putin was “evil” and “an international thug” but also that he was “intelligent” so “we have to treat him as such.” Not surprisingly, both the McCrory campaign and the Democratic Party spent the next 24 hours making hay of Budd’s foolish choice of words. He’d been better off showing up for the debate and defending his record, which is actually more mixed on Russia than his critics suggest.

The Senate primary isn’t the only race where the issue is likely to bite. Last week, GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke to a white-nationalist organization in Orlando where the organizer asked the audience to “give a round of applause for Russia” and got chants of “Putin! Putin!” in response. Greene tried to pretend later she didn’t know what she’d gotten herself into, but no one believed her. Some GOP candidates here in North Carolina have sought her endorsement or been on stage with her. You’re going to hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks.

On the Democratic side, President Biden’s disastrous first year in office has set up his party for a disastrous midterm election. Now Democrats are hoping his efforts to organize an anti-Putin coalition will not only get results in Ukraine but also bring voters around to the Democratic ticket.

North Carolinians do care. In a pre-invasion High Point University poll, 47% said Russia’s military build-up on the Ukraine border was a “major threat” to U.S. interests, with another 27% calling it a “minor threat.”

Most voters don’t favor direct American military invention, of course, which isn’t in the cards anyway. They do favor tough talk and tougher sanctions. And they’re right.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The early history of North Carolina is full of fascinating characters. John Kincaid was one of them.

A Scotch-Irish immigrant to North Carolina in the late 1700s, Kincaid produced not only a mindboggling number of descendants in Lincoln, Gaston, Caldwell, Burke, and neighboring counties — beginning with his 18 children by two different wives — but also a colorful and often-repeated tale of Patriot resistance during the Revolutionary War.

Born around 1710 to Scottish residents of Northern Ireland, Kincaid spent the first three decades of his life there before immigrating to Pennsylvania with his wife and six children around 1745. After giving birth to three more children, Kincaid’s wife Julie passed away. He soon took another wife, Nancy Nixon, and proceeded to have nine more children.

Kincaid appears to have been a shoemaker by trade who also farmed. By the late 1750s, he’d grown dissatisfied with life in Pennsylvania. Among other things, John is recorded to have “complained of the amount of his tax.” (Who doesn’t?)

So, their growing family moved southward. Kincaid purchased 850 acres of land on Catawba Creek, in what would soon become Lincoln County, North Carolina. Some of his children were adults by then, and either set up homes on their father’s property or acquired neighboring parcels.

It didn’t take long for the neighbors to learn two things about John Kincaid. First, he was a fierce critic of British policy towards the American colonies — a “strong old-line Whig,” one said. And second, Kincaid was a stubborn man.

When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, several of his sons went off to fight. John Jr. served under General Thomas Sumter in South Carolina and fought at Kings Mountain. James participated in a 1778 campaign against the British-allied Cherokees and later served during the British siege of Charleston. Robert joined a militia unit combating British-allied Tories in western North Carolina.

As for John Kincaid Sr., he was 65 in 1775, and thus too old to go off to war. Instead, the war came to him.

Likely because of his well-known antipathy to the British, Kincaid was the target of repeated harassment by local Tories. As a large landowner, he was also suspected of possessing significant wealth. One day late in the war, a band of Tories showed up at his door with a demand: give us your money or else. John Kincaid chose the “or else.” So, the Tories tied a noose around Kincaid’s neck and strung him up in his own barn.

As Kincaid was kicking and clawing at the rope, the Tories heard the sound of approaching horses and took off. His wife Nancy and two of their daughters then rushed into the barn and cut the rope just in time to save his life.

But it was just the first attack. Upon hearing the news that John Kincaid still lived, the Tories returned to his house and again demanded his money. Kincaid again refused. They hanged him a second time. And again, the sound of horses chased them off, allowing Nancy to cut her husband down.

Incredibly, Kincaid had survived his second hanging. But the rope cut grooves into his skin and injured his neck. That’s how he got his nickname: “Crooked Neck John” Kincaid. Even more incredibly, he lived for another three decades. In 1792, he moved again, this time to a 1,400-acre farm with a grain mill in a Burke County community named for one of his new neighbors: Hoodsville.

Yep, old Crooked Neck John was my ancestor — three different ways, in fact. His daughter Ibby Kincaid married my great-great-great-grandfather John Hood. And two of John Kincaid’s descendants married each other to produce my great-great-grandmother Betty Kincaid. (In the backcountry you made do.)

John Kincaid passed away in 1811 at the age of 101. He had lived long enough to see his beloved American Revolution give birth to a new republic of liberty.

And those Tories never got their damned hands on his money.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians work in companies that sell goods and services all around the world. They’ll prosper, as will our state, to the extent we knock down barriers to our exports.

Few disagree with that goal. Differences of opinion arise when we get specific. Consider the recent news that the United States ran a trade deficit of $859 billion last year. In dollar terms, that’s the largest such deficit in the country’s history. It’s also a 27% increase over the trade deficit for 2020.

At the risk of sparking the first big disagreement, I should say at the outset that I don’t think the trade deficit is itself an issue of critical importance. It doesn’t signify, for example, that our exporters took in on the chin. In fact, goods exports shot up 23% last year to $1.8 trillion, also a record amount, as economies around the world began to recover from the COVID crisis and their consumers gobbled up American-made products.

Of course, American consumers also gobbled up goods imported from abroad. And America’s service industries didn’t have as good a year, in part because of continued weakness in education and tourism (if foreigners come to the U.S. to study or travel, their expenditures constitute exports).

So, the net result was a trade deficit — but that hardly made it a crisis. American consumers got products they highly valued. And our service sector will likely bounce back more strongly in 2022 as COVID-induced fears and restrictions fade. More fundamentally, because America remains one of the best places to invest money, we are going to run trade deficits of some size for the foreseeable future. It’s an inescapable fact of accounting: if we run a capital-account surplus, we must run a current-account deficit, the vast majority of which will be a trade deficit.

Now, let’s talk about China. America’s $355 billion trade deficit with that country represented 41% of the total. Again, exports to China rose but imports from China rose much more.

Remember the deal former President Trump negotiated with the Chinese regime two years ago? It required the Chinese to purchase an additional $200 billion in American imports by the end of 2021.

The deal didn’t stick. Chinese imports from American firms turned out to be only 57% of the “required” figure. Moreover, since the 2020 agreement came after the former president initiated a trade war, setting off cycles of retaliatory tariffs, the real point of comparison would be exports to China now vs. exports to China before the tariff escalation. By that metric, the policy has been an abject failure. Our exports to China haven’t yet returned to the pre-trade-war baseline.

I’m not arguing that the Trump administration bungled the execution of the agreement during its last year, or that the Biden administration bungled it during 2021. I’m rejecting the entire premise that the way to help American industries sell more overseas is to negotiate sales quotas with national governments. Exports to China went up last year but exports to our other trading partners, especially in Europe, went up more. The latter didn’t happen because a bunch of politicians set sales quotas.

We need to stop trying to manage trade and focus instead on slashing taxes (tariffs) and increasing our economy’s productive capacity.

With regard to the first goal, the best way to encourage the governments of our trading partners to lower tariffs and other barriers to accessing their markets is to offer reductions in our existing barriers to their goods and services — not to raise tariffs first and seek negotiation later. As recent experience has shown, that tends to provoke retaliatory tariffs, not productive discussion leading to net reductions in trade barriers.

And with regard to productive capacity, North Carolina leaders and their counterparts in Washington have full power to act on their own. Reforming our systems of taxation, regulation, education, and infrastructure would help all our businesses, including exporters, to grow and thrive.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

What’s the hottest political issue right now? According to recent poll results, it’s inflation. Welcome to the 1970s, folks.

A CNN survey, for example, asked respondents to choose the two issues they deemed “most important for the U.S. government to address.” Inflation was the top or second choice of 42% of respondents, followed by border security at 29%, voting rights at 28%, and crime at 21%.

These and other polls have clear political implications for the 2022 election cycle. But today let’s consider the policy implications of that top-ranked concern, inflation.

When inflation ramps up, it often outranks other issues in political salience for two interrelated reasons. First, it’s highly visible and affects most of us directly. Second, because the best definition of inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, it has a broad range of plausible causes and remedies — which means we can all grab our favorite hobbyhorse from the corner and ride it for a good long while.

Too much money? Well, that means the Federal Reserve has pumped up the economy with too much credit, or that the federal government has run massive deficits to fund excessive “stimulus” schemes. Too few goods (and services)? That means COVID and the resulting restrictions have screwed up our supply chains, or that workers need more child care or other government help so they can fill jobs, or that COVID-era subsidies and regulations have kept too many workers on the sidelines of the labor market, crimping supply even as they spend stimulus dollars to boost demand.

Let’s run with that last causal narrative for a moment. Here in North Carolina, the headline U-3 unemployment rate in December was 3.7%, down from 6.1% a year ago and 13.5% at the height of the brief but painful COVID recession. That represents lots of shuttered businesses reopening, new businesses starting, and sidelined workers coming back to work.

Not nearly enough of the latter, however. If you look only at the U-3 rate, you miss that. The share of working-age North Carolinians who are either employed or actively looking for work, a measure called labor-force participation, was 59.4% in December. That’s also a significant improvement from the April 2020 rate (56.2%). But in February 2020, it was 61.3%.

Consider another statistic: the employment-population ratio. Some 57.2% of working-age North Carolinians were employed in December. Two years earlier, the rate was 59.4%. If that were the case today, about 187,000 more North Carolinians would be working. If you’re wondering whether they’d really have jobs to fill, just ask businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies in your community. Their managers will say yes — and hand you an application, masking their desperation with a hopeful smile.

I don’t think there’s a magic wand we can wave to make the labor shortage go away. I remain convinced that politicians offered too many subsidies for too long, through expanded unemployment insurance and other means, inducing workers on the margin to stay home. Still, those effects have largely run their course. Most jurisdictions and establishments are also lifting COVID restrictions, including whatever vaccine, social distancing, and mask mandates they may have imposed. That will help, though not instantaneously.

Looking beyond short-term remedies, there’s plenty of evidence that many potential workers face a range of structural obstacles to becoming gainfully employed. Some were poorly served by schools and lack basic skills. Some have untreated mental illnesses and addictions. Some would like to enter new, higher-paid occupations or start their own small businesses but are stymied by unwise occupational-licensing laws and other regulations. A recent study by Utah State University professor Alicia Plemmons found that states with more-burdensome licensing laws tend to fare worse in business starts and employment than do states with freer labor markets.

In the 1970s, high marginal tax rates were a big factor on the supply side of inflation. Today, it’s more likely to be regulation. The right response is still the Right response, however: unshackle supply.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The late Walt Disney made a name for himself, and a fortune, by excelling in fields crowded with other high performers: cartooning, publishing, filmmaking, marketing, and storytelling. “I have been up against tough competition all my life,” Disney once said. “I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”

There’s nothing perfect about competition. It’s exhausting, sometimes frustrating, often messy. There are no guarantees. Still, competition usually drives cost down and quality up. Its absence usually leads to trouble.

Those of us who advocate educational freedom bring a variety of assumptions and objectives to the cause. We don’t all make the same arguments and favor the same policies. What we share is a common belief that students will receive a better education when their parents are empowered to make choices among competing alternatives.

Our belief is based on common sense and personal preference. Few of us would prefer to live in a community where there’s only one place to buy our groceries or clothing, one restaurant to get a bite, one channel to watch, one doctor to visit, or one lawyer to hire. We want multiple options because that makes it more likely we’ll find one to our liking. We want multiple providers competing for our business.

If the case for educational freedom were predicated solely on this personal belief, though, we’d be inviting the argument that there’s something unique about schooling, something that makes competition harmful in education even if it’s helpful in other sectors.

Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on supposition. We know from practical experience that educational choice is commonplace and popular. North Carolina has had charter schools for a quarter of a century and school vouchers for nearly a decade. Other states have had school-choice programs in place for longer than that. Ever-increasing numbers of parents happily exercise these options, just as even larger numbers happily use their government grants or subsidized loans to patronize competing preschools, colleges, and universities.

Other countries also have education systems that feature parental choice and tax funding for private alternatives. Some 90% of 15-year-old students in Hong Kong attend privately managed schools, as do about three-quarters of 15-year-olds in Belgium, two-thirds in Britain and the Netherlands, 42% in Australia, 39% in Korea, and 31% in Japan.

In theory, this could all be a waste of resources — or worse. But there is a large and growing body of research suggesting otherwise. Whether privately run schools are consistently better at educating students is not really the key question, by the way. What matters most is whether increased competition — among public schools at least, and within a broader market of options at most — tends to make schools more effective and students and their families better off.

A study published in the latest issue of the journal Education Next found such benefits from the robust school choice available in Florida. “Students enrolled at local public schools with more market competition from nearby private or parochial schools,” they wrote, “earned higher scores in reading and math and were less likely to be absent or suspended from schools.”

Another new study focused on a Los Angeles initiative in which parents were given more choices among public high schools. The authors concluded that the increased competition “boosted student outcomes markedly, closing achievement and college-going gaps.” They found that Los Angeles parents placed great weight on academic quality when making choices, creating “competition-induced incentives” for schools to improve their effectiveness.

Some of the scholarly support for the value of school competition comes from right here in North Carolina, where researchers have found that proximity to charter schools tends to boost the performance of students who continue to attend district-run schools, though the effects vary in size and scope.

I know that vociferous critics of choice are unlikely to find such evidence persuasive. Nor is the academic literature unanimous on the subject. Still, there’s nothing weird about importing competition into education. It’s popular. And it likely improves school quality.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolina has been politically competitive for a long time. It will remain so for the foreseeable future, although the structure and focal points of that political competition have always been subject to change.

For example, from 1980 to 2008, Republicans could properly count on North Carolina being a likely “get” for president even as Democrats usually dominated state and local offices. The 1992 cycle was a bit of an outlier, because of Ross Perot’s presence in a three-man field, but generally Republican presidential campaigns weren’t very worried about the state and Democratic campaigns weren’t very hopeful about it.

Barack Obama changed the equation. While he lost the state again in 2012, and Trump won our electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, all these contests were competitive and the margins modest.

Speaking of state and local offices, the widespread assumption when I first started covering North Carolina politics in the 1980s was that the legislature would be Democratic but Republicans could reasonably hope to win gubernatorial and, by the end of the decade, judicial races.

Then came 1994. While Republicans only held the North Carolina House for four years, and still hadn’t yet won the North Carolina Senate, both parties adjusted to the new reality of a General Assembly truly in play for the first time. Democratic leaders “adjusted” to it in 2001 by enacting the most-egregious gerrymander of legislative districts in modern history, failing to convince a GOP-dominated Supreme Court to let them get away with it, and then using various unsavory and illegal means, including out-and-out bribery, to retain control for the rest of the decade.

Their luck ran out in 2010 when the Republicans — vastly outspent and forced to run in Democratic-drawn districts — won majorities in both chambers. They proceeded to draw districts highly favorable to the GOP, losing a string of court cases but continuing to reelect legislative majorities, anyway, in part because of ongoing shifts in the partisan preferences of rural and suburban voters.

While all this was going on, however, Republicans struggled to convert their gains at the legislative and local levels into success in top-of-the-ballot offices. Since 1992, only one Republican has been elected governor, Pat McCrory, and he served a single term.

Individual candidates and match-ups matter. So does the behavior of split-ticket voters, who may be fewer in number than a generation or two ago but remain decisive in a closely divided state. In the past, quite a few North Carolinians voted reliably Republican for president, Congress, and U.S. Senate but preferred Democrats for state and local office. Now we see something like the reverse — a small but critical bloc of voters who pick Republicans for state legislature or county commission but are willing to pick Democrats for governor or president if they don’t sound too extreme.

As a true partisan battleground, North Carolina and a small number of similarly situated states enjoy disproportionate attention from national media and disproportionate influence over national affairs. There are many different ways to measure this, but I find the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index (PVI) to be especially handy.

It doesn’t rely on party registration, a lagging and often misleading statistic, or even on self-identification by voters. Instead, it aggregates election results from several recent cycles. For North Carolina as a whole, Cook’s PVI is +3 Republican. Florida, Georgia, and Arizona all have that same PVI rating. Seems about right.

Only 14 states have PVI values within a range of +3 Democratic to +3 Republican. In addition to the ones mentioned above, they are blue-tilting Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Minnesota, and Maine; red-tilting Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and dead-even Nevada and New Hampshire.

These 14 battleground states aren’t the only places where split-ticket voting can produce striking outcomes. Massachusetts, Maryland, and Vermont have popular Republican governors. Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana have Democratic ones. In presidential and senatorial contests, however, the list of consistently competitive places remains short — and contains North Carolina.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

“Perfect 2400 SAT. All 5 on AP. One B in 11th.”

“Brown?!”

“Heck no. Asian.”

“Of course. Still impressive.”

This online chat between admissions officers reflects poorly on the culture and policies of the university employing them. It shows them engaging in crude racial classification. The obvious implication is that while high test scores and grades would make a “brown” applicant stand out, such performance is “of course” more expected from an Asian applicant, although in this case perfect scores on both SAT and AP exams were “still impressive.”

I’m embarrassed to say that the employer of those admissions officers was my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The transcript of their online chat became evidence in a discrimination lawsuit filed against UNC in 2014 by a group called Students for Fair Admissions.

I’m also embarrassed to admit that other public universities in my native state also discriminate by race and ethnicity, just as Chapel Hill does, by admitting students with markedly weaker scores and other credentials if they are members of “under-represented minorities” — that is, if they are “brown” rather than white or Asian.

If you share my embarrassment about this, I’m pleased to report some good news: the UNC system may soon find its way back to a just and honorable admissions policy and thus regain some of the moral authority it has surrendered. That is, UNC may lose its case.

Students for Fair Admissions has two active lawsuits challenging racial preferences, one at UNC-Chapel Hill (the nation’s oldest public university) and the other at Harvard University (the nation’s oldest private university). The U.S. Supreme Court has now accepted and combined both cases for consideration during its next term, which begins this fall.

Lower courts sided with UNC-Chapel Hill and Harvard. But if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet on the same result from the Supreme Court. I doubt a majority of the justices would have agreed to take these cases unless they intended at least to narrow considerably the conditions under which admissions departments can take race or ethnicity into account.

Indeed, the Court granted cert in the UNC-Chapel Hill case even though it had only proceeded as far as the federal district court. In October, Judge Loretta Biggs ruled against the plaintiffs in the case, concluding that UNC’s practices were consistent with precedent. Students for Fair Admissions asked the justices to bypass the Court of Appeals, in part so the UNC-Chapel Hill case could be combined with and argued alongside the Harvard case.

It wasn’t that long ago, in 2016, that the Supreme Court upheld racial preferences in a case involving the University of Texas. But that was a 4-3 decision. The composition of the Court has shifted since then. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who sometimes sides with the Court’s Democratic appointees for institutional or prudential reasons, seems implacably opposed to the continued use of racial preference as a remedy for past injustices, calling it “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

For example, in a 2007 opinion about race-conscious student assignment among public schools in Seattle and Louisville, Roberts wrote that in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, “schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”

He’s right about this issue. The case against UNC-Chapel Hill’s policy is overwhelming. Race isn’t just a “plus factor” used to break a few ties here or there. The plaintiffs presented compelling evidence that Asian students with stellar high-school careers are being rejected even as other minority students with much-lower grades and scores are being accepted.

In other words, UNC-Chapel Hill systematically denies admission to hard-working young people because they are the “wrong” color. It’s time to end this abhorrent practice.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a column pointing out that Republican-led states outpaced Democratic-led states in population growth last year. Indeed, some blue-tinted places such as California, New York, and Illinois had a net outflow of residents while red-tinted places such as Florida, Texas, and our own state of North Carolina had a net inflow.

While I was careful to note that many other factors, such as weather and recreational amenities, influence where people choose to live, I argued that the relationship between GOP governance and in-migration was unlikely to be a coincidence. “Generally speaking, Republican-led states tax and regulate less than Democratic-led states do,” I wrote. “These policy choices, in turn, tend to make Republican-led states gain population faster by producing signals that prospective migrants can readily discern,” such as better job opportunities and lower-cost housing.

Many readers agreed. Others vehemently disagreed. I truly appreciate both kinds of feedback, which was far higher in this instance than I usually experience.

I got so much response, I think, because of how much this issue shapes the political narratives that partisans tell themselves. For decades, North Carolina Democrats insisted that our state was more progressive and economically successful than other Southern states because the state was willing to “invest” significant sums in education and infrastructure. They discounted the influence of taxation and regulation on the decisions of households and businesses.

The GOP narrative accepted neither of the Democrats’ premises. First, Republicans pointed out that North Carolina wasn’t really outperforming lower-taxed states in the region. Second, they argued that cutting taxes and reducing regulations would, indeed, make North Carolina a more attractive place to live, work, and build businesses.

For Democrats, the past decade has been excruciating. Their loss of the General Assembly in 2010 — which occurred despite the fact that they vastly outspent their GOP rivals that year and ran in districts Democrats drew to favor themselves — meant they were no longer in a position to act on and further their cherished narrative.

Now it was the Republicans’ turn. Democrats predicted disaster. They were mistaken.

Their mistake didn’t just come from underestimating the role that tax rates and regulatory costs play in economic decisions, though these price signals are important. Democrats and the progressives who advise them also tend to overestimate the efficiency of government spending. They assume that states spending more money on, say, education and infrastructure will likely end up with more-productive schools, roads, and other public assets.

I recently pulled data for the 10 most-populous states in the country: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Over the past decade, four grew faster than the national average: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Now let’s look at government services. For schools, I used National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in reading and math administered to fourth- and eighth-graders, adjusting the scores for student demographics. For infrastructure, I used the 2021 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers and the 2021 Highway Report from the Reason Foundation.

Here are the five big states with the best schools, in descending order: Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Illinois. The top five in infrastructure quality are Georgia, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Illinois. The top five in highway performance are North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Michigan. By contrast, the two largest blue states, California and New York, fare poorly on nearly all performance measures.

I’m not arguing that red states always deliver better government services. What I am arguing — and what sophisticated studies spanning all 50 states and dozens of metrics tend to find — is that there isn’t a strong relationship between what governments spend and the quality of services they provide.

The Democrats were never wrong about education and infrastructure, of course. These are valuable services. What they got wrong was assuming that Republican policies are inconsistent with delivering these services effectively. The facts show otherwise. They complicate the narrative.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

In this era of increasing partisan polarization, is the “middle” shrinking before our eyes?

This is a familiar claim, and it’s not entirely without foundation. In a new Gallup poll, for example, 37% of respondents identified themselves as moderates. Back in 1992, 43% of Americans told Gallup they were moderates.

Still, when you graph those poll results over the entire 30-year period, the result bears little resemblance to the cliff that today’s media chatter might lead you to expect. The line slopes gently downward. And here’s another trend that might surprise you. The share of Americans identifying themselves as conservative has changed little. It was 36% three decades ago and is 36% today. It’s the liberal label that has become more popular, rising from 17% in 1992 to 25% today.

Although it may seem straightforward to measure ideology by asking poll respondents them to label themselves, I’ve long had doubts about this practice. The words “conservative,” “liberal,” and “moderate” have no fixed and universally accepted meanings. They mean different things to different people.

Indeed, by requiring that respondents choose only one of the responses, pollsters force artificial distinctions on people who may not think in rigidly categorical terms. Someone might consider herself conservative because she’s frugal with money and goes to church every Sunday while also considering herself moderate (“I’m a reasonable person, not an extremist”) and liberal (“I’m open-minded and try to see the good in everyone I meet”).

When analyzing political behavior, then, or teaching one of my classes, I tend to rely on polls that asked more pointed questions or delve into specific issues. Fortunately, Gallup supplements its self-identification test with many such questions.

Consider this question, asked since the early 1990s: “Some people think government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government ought to do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your view?”

Unlike the results of the self-identification test, the answers to this question about government activism have gyrated quite a lot over the years. Most of the time, the former position (the more conservative one) is significantly more popular than the “government ought to do more” position. During much of the 1990s and 2010s, for example, about 60% picked the right-leaning position while only 32% picked the left-leaning one.

During recessions, wars, or other crises, however, the lines converged or even crossed. Just after the 9/11 attacks, 50% of Americans wanted government to be more active vs. 41% who said it was doing too much. The gap was even larger in 2020 as the COVID crisis hit (54% to 41%), though it flipped back to a conservative edge (52% to 43%) in 2021.

You see something like the same pattern for this Gallup question, which is even more specific: “In general, do you think there is too much, too little, or the right amount of government regulation of business and industry?” During most of the last three decades, a plurality of respondents said there was too much regulation. The only exceptions were in the first year of the financial crisis and the first year of the COVID crisis, when “too much” and “the right amount” were roughly tied.

Care to guess the year when business regulation was the least popular? The answer may surprise you. It was 2011, the year before Barack Obama was reelected president, when 50% of Americans said there was too much regulation, 24% said there was too little, and 23% said it was just right.

There have been some sizable shifts in public opinion since the early 1990s, but they don’t have much to do with fiscal or economic policy. Today’s voters are far more accepting of same-sex marriage than they were then, for instance. Taken as a whole, though, poll results suggest the extremes aren’t really growing rapidly at the expense of a truly vanishing middle. Polarization isn’t the same thing as radicalization.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Perhaps we should “follow the science” and abolish North Carolina’s pre-kindergarten program.

After all, the largest and most sophisticated scientific evaluation ever attempted of a statewide pre-k program has just reported its latest findings — and they are damning. The pre-k program run by our neighboring state of Tennessee doesn’t just fail to accomplish its stated goal of improving academic and behavioral outcomes. It actually seems to worsen those outcomes.

That is, children who attended Tennessee’s pre-k program have lower scores and worse behavior by the time they reach the sixth grade than do otherwise comparable children who didn’t attend pre-k. “At least for poor children, it turns out that something is not better than nothing,” said one of the evaluators, Vanderbilt University professor Dale Farran. “The kinds of pre-k that our poor children are going into are not good for them long term.”

Okay, then. If we abolished North Carolina’s pre-kindergarten and related programs, that would save us hundreds of millions of dollars a year while also protecting our children from potential long-term harm.

If you find my conclusion implausible and my recommendation outrageous, your brain may well be on overdrive coming up with questions about the Tennessee study’s design, validity, and relevance to North Carolina. Good for you! Readers ought to greet any sweeping claim of scientific authority with caution. A skeptical mind is a healthy mind, as long as the skepticism doesn’t dissolve into cynicism or conspiratorial thinking.

For example, you might point to previous studies that show positive associations between preschool intervention and outcome measures for at-risk students. Those studies certainly do exist, and many policymakers have found them persuasive in the past. That’s one of the main reasons North Carolina, Tennessee, and other states adopted preschool programs of various kinds over the past three decades. It’s why many progressive activists and Democratic politicians have spent years trying to enact universal pre-k nationwide, most recently as part of the Biden administration’s now-defunct Build Back Better legislation.

Nearly all prior studies, however, fall into one of two categories. The first is observational. The researchers assemble publicly available data and try to tease out the effects of preschool interventions by holding variables such as family structure and income constant and then looking for statistical correlations between, say, preschool spending and subsequent student performance.

The other, more-valuable kind of study is experimental. Researchers identify a group of needy preschoolers and then pick at random only some of those children to attend the pre-k program in question. The others comprise the control group. By tracking all the children as they proceed through school and beyond, researchers look for persistent differences between the two groups.

The multi-year Tennessee study is experimental, not observational. Two factors set it apart from prior experiments, however. One is its sheer scale. Most long-term studies of preschool intervention involve small groups of students attending a single program or set of programs. They are essentially laboratory experiments, providing interesting information but not necessarily assessing what would really happen if a promising idea were scaled up to a statewide program.

The other distinguishing factor is the Tennessee study’s recency. Some of the most-powerful findings in the preschool-intervention literature come from tiny experiments that began in the 1960s or 1970s. Both safety-net programs and the market for day care look very different today than they did back then. As Grover Whitehurst, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, once observed, “concluding that findings from these studies demonstrate that current and contemplated state pre-k programs will have similar effects is akin to believing that an expansion of the number of U.S. post offices today will spur economic development because there is some evidence that constructing post offices 50 years ago had that effect.”

Now, I don’t really think North Carolina policymakers should or will respond to the Tennessee study by abolishing our prekindergarten programs. But should we vastly expand them, as progressives routinely demand?

No. That wouldn’t be following the science.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

By restricting competition among hospitals and other medical providers, North Carolina keeps the cost of health care down while maintaining or even enhancing the quality of services provided.

If that claim makes sense to you, then congratulations — you are among a select group of North Carolinians likely to view our state’s certificate-of-need (CON) law as a good public policy. You may well think it sensible and prudent for state regulators in Raleigh to attempt to determine how many hospital beds, MRI devices, and other medical options should be available in your community.

I confess that I’m not eligible to join your club. My experience tells me that when government artificially restricts competition and innovation, the result is unlikely to be in the interest of anyone other than the monopolists or cartel members fortunate enough to obtain such a permission slip from the government.

It isn’t just my personal experience telling me that squashing competition is bad for consumers, however. My reading of the empirical evidence renders CON regulation impossible to defend in a state that has on so many other fronts made progress in streamlining regulations and maximizing economic freedom.

In 1974, the federal government ordered North Carolina and all other states to implement CON as a form of central planning in health care. At the time, the rationale offered was that because of the way medical services are financed and consumed, traditional market forces can’t work properly. If multiple hospitals are allowed to own competing machines and offer competing services, the argument went, costs will go up, not down. Hospitals hurting for revenue will have strong incentives to keep expensive machines in operation, even if there is little likely benefit to patients, and simply pass the bill to institutional payers.

It was never a ridiculous rationale. In fact, the prevalence of third-party payment — private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs — does distort how medical services are bought and sold.

Still, the case for CON regulation must rest on more than theory. Do state-mandated monopolies and cartels really make health care less expensive or more efficacious? Alas, no. Because the original 1974 federal mandate was later repealed, some states have abolished or significantly curtailed their CON systems. North Carolina hasn’t. In fact, a Mercatus Center study found that our state ranked second in the nation in the number of medical facilities and services subject to CON.

Because these regulations vary widely across states, researchers have been able to exploit that variation to evaluate their effects. Most studies show that CON doesn’t reduce health care costs. Indeed, quite a few suggest that constraining competition increases cost.

More troubling, it seems to me, is the growing body of evidence linking CON regulations to adverse outcomes for patients. For example, a 2021 paper published in the Journal of Health Economics estimated that by restricting access to services, the advent of CON increased the number of heart-attack deaths by as much as 10%.

A 2020 paper published in the Journal of Private Enterprise explored the range of patient experiences in the emergency departments of hospitals across CON and non-CON states. The authors found that CON laws were associated with longer wait times to be seen, longer wait times before admission to hospitals, longer wait times until discharge from the emergency department, and longer wait times to receive medication. “These metrics indicate that multiple CON laws could be a significant detriment to patient outcomes in terms of hospital cost and patient mortality even though the laws’ stated benefits are to help patients,” the authors wrote.

Another recent study, published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management, looked at the timely question of how state regulation affected hospital capacity during the COVID crisis. “Certificate-of-need laws seem to have exacerbated the risk of running out of beds during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors concluded.

North Carolina needs more health-care competition, not less. If you ever belonged to the CON club, please reconsider your membership status.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Do you think felons should lose their right to vote? If so, do you think they should be able to regain that right after getting out of prison or should they have to wait until they complete any probation or parole requirement that follows prison? Or do you think a felony conviction should forever block someone from participating in elections?

Wherever you may stand on these questions, you don’t stand alone. Opinions vary. According to a 2018 YouGov survey, 24% of Americans think felons should be able to vote even while they are incarcerated, while 38% think they should be able to vote when they complete their prison sentences and 63% think they should be able to when they’re no longer on probation or parole. That leaves some 37% who are either unsure about the issue or think that felons should never be able to vote.

For decades, North Carolina adhered to the policy that happened to have the broadest public support. The state stripped those convicted of felonies of the right to vote and allowed them to regain that right after completing their full sentences, including probation and parole.

In 2019, a group of felons, assisted by several left-wing organizations and attorneys, sued to overturn the policy as a violation of the North Carolina constitution. The plaintiffs didn’t claim that taking away the voting rights of felons was inherently unconstitutional. That would have been silly. “No person adjudged guilty of a felony,” the constitution states in Article 6, Section 2, “shall be permitted to vote unless that person shall first be restored to the rights of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law.”

Rather, the plaintiffs argued that felons should regain their voting rights as soon as they get out of prison, even if they remain under some kind of post-release supervision. Otherwise, felons who lack financial resources are excluded from the franchise longer than those who can pay the fees and restitution required under probation. That’s a violation of equal protection, say the plaintiffs.

Last August, a panel of three Superior Court judges agreed, at least in part. They struck down the statute in question and ordered the state to restore the right to vote to some 56,000 felons who are out of prison but still on probation or parole.

A month later, however, the North Carolina Court of Appeals stayed that decision until the case can be fully argued. The Supreme Court declined to remove the stay. So, for now, the original policy stands.

I freely admit that to say North Carolina’s original policy enjoys broad support among the general public is not to say it is necessarily wise or constitutional. Ours is not a system of government by opinion survey. It isn’t even a majority-always-rules system of government, although some politicians and activists like to claim otherwise when it suits their purpose.

Why do we have constitutionally protected rights and procedures in the first place? Because majorities can be just as tyrannical as minorities or autocracies.

Still, not all disputes, even about basic civil rights such as voting, can or should be settled by lawyers and judges in a courtroom. How long should the polls stay open on Election Day? What rules should govern those who wish to vote early, or by absentee ballot? And, as in this case, what is the proper balance between maximizing participation in elections and requiring that participants shoulder basic responsibilities of citizenship, which include registering to vote in the proper place within a reasonable time and — need this be said — obeying the criminal laws of our state and nation?

These questions do not have simple, obvious answers. For instance, any set of voting rules may affect people somewhat differently based on location, work status, or other characteristics. The tradeoffs involved ought to be hashed out through conversation and compromise in a public, deliberative process.

In other words, they are the kind of questions properly answered by legislation, not litigation.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

During each election cycle, we are treated to an endless parade of politicians extolling freedom. Given how many of them subsequently vote to restrict our freedom in myriad ways, we have ample reason to be skeptical about politicians.

But we should not let our skepticism become cynicism, or realism become defeatism. The cause of freedom is not a sports team for whom we root but whose defeat does us no real harm. Nor is freedom simply an abstraction to which we should occasionally salute while going about our daily lives.

Freedom is of great practical value. The more government suppresses it, the poorer and unhappier its citizens become.

Back in the 17th century, France’s Louis XIV showed just how foolhardy it can be to restrict freedom. The “Sun King” ruled a mostly Catholic country with a significant Protestant minority, the Huguenots. After decades of religious conflict, Louis’s grandfather Henry IV had promulgated a new policy of toleration, the Edict of Nantes, in 1598. Under its protection, the Huguenot community had grown and prospered, producing a disproportionate number of the doctors, lawyers, financiers, and merchants of France.

But Louis XIV disliked the policy of toleration. When he took the reins of power in 1661, Huguenots began to lose their freedom. Louis formally renounced the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He ordered Huguenot ministers into exile while forbidding the rest of the Huguenots from leaving France. If they were caught trying to leave, the penalty could be compulsory naval service for men, imprisonment for women, or death.

While the king’s policy did force many to convert to Catholicism, a significant percentage of the Huguenots – including many of France’s ablest professionals and entrepreneurs – defied his command and sought escape to the Low Countries, Switzerland, England, and beyond.

Among them were two teenagers, Abraham Michaux and Suzanne Rochet, who were engaged to be married. They decided to flee separately and meet in Holland. Abraham made it out on the first attempt. But Suzanne didn’t. She had hidden herself in a wagon with her sister, who had an infant son. His cries resulted in their capture.

Later, two of Suzanne’s sisters escaped, promising to send a coded letter to Suzanne when they thought the time was right for her to make a break for it. The code would read: “It would be perfectly fine to send the little nightcap which we left behind.” When the signal letter finally arrived, Suzanne was determined to try again for freedom — this time, by secreting herself in a wine cask on an English ship bound for Holland.

Imagine young Suzanne, 18 years old, sealed up in a dark, cramped, smelly cask for hours. At one point she had to stifle a scream when she heard French policemen whacking the cask with their guns to see if anything was hidden inside. Then she felt the cask being lifted and loaded onto the ship. Only after it reached the open sea could she emerge in safety.

Suzanne Rochet — known to Huguenot history as “Little Nightcap” — made it to Holland and reunited with her beloved, Abraham Michaux. They married in 1692 and made their home in Amsterdam, where she gave birth to the first seven of their 12 children. In 1702, the Michaux family joined other French exiles on a ship bound for a new Huguenot settlement on the James River in Virginia. That’s where Abraham and Suzanne’s remaining children were born, including my 7th great-grandmother, Elizabeth Michaux.

Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes wasn’t just morally wrong. It was a colossal blunder. It weakened his own country and enriched his enemies. We should learn from his mistakes, and from those of other rulers who treat people as cogs in a machine that only some ruling elite can operate.

We are not cogs. We are citizens. Politicians should protect our rights, perform only the necessary functions of a limited government, and otherwise leave us alone. They’ll be glad they did.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

From July 2020 to July 2021, there was a net inflow of 637,729 Americans into these top-five destination states: Florida, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina. During the same period, there was a net outflow of 918,443 Americans from these top-five exporter states: California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Louisiana.

All five of the top in-migration states have Republican legislatures. Four of the five have Republican governors (North Carolina is the exception). On the other side of the ledger, four of the top out-migration states have Democratic governors, and four of the five have Democratic legislatures. “That’s all you need to know!” Republicans proclaim. “That’s all just a coincidence!” Democrats insist.

You probably think I’m going to say that the truth is more complicated than either side would admit. And you’re right — but it’s not that much more complicated.

Partisan control of government is obviously not the sole determinant of where Americans choose to live. In fact, for many individuals and families seeking to relocate, whether a state has a Republican or Democratic legislature isn’t an explicit criterion at all. They’re taking new jobs, moving closer to family or other desirable amenities, or opting for warmer climes as they plan for or begin their retirement.

Indeed, if you look at the list of places experiencing a net outflow of Americans last year, it includes states such as Ohio and North Dakota with GOP governors and legislatures. And some blue states such as Colorado, Delaware, and Oregon enjoyed a net influx.

Now that I’ve done the requisite throat-clearing, however, it is simply undeniable that when it comes to relocation patterns, politics matters. It’s not about party labels. It’s about what they signify. Generally speaking, Republican-led states tax and regulate less than Democratic-led states do. These policy choices, in turn, tend to make Republican-led states gain population faster by producing signals that prospective migrants can readily discern.

For example, if you’re weighing multiple job offers with roughly comparable salaries, you may well go where you can buy the most house for your money, which will typically be in places where property taxes are low and home prices aren’t jacked up artificially by regulatory burdens. Alternatively, if what you really want to do is start your own business rather than working for someone else, freer economies are usually the better bet.

Dozens of academic studies confirm these relationships. Places ranking higher on economic freedom tend to enjoy higher rates of job creation, business starts, and population growth. Consider a 2020 paper in the Southern Economic Journal that used a local economic-freedom index to examine relocation patterns. It found that for every 10% increase in a metropolitan area’s economic-freedom score, in-migration went up 27%. In a new American Business Review study of state population trends, economist Richard Cebula found that levels of both entrepreneurial activity and personal freedom are associated with higher rates of in-migration.

In the age of COVID, differences in governing philosophy came into sharper relief. During the initial lockdowns, Democratic-led states shut down quicker and longer. Republican-led states were more likely to keep schools open. Americans noticed. While most wanted their governments to take the pandemic seriously, they also wanted their governments to be reasonable.

Here in North Carolina, a flock of progressive Chicken Littles spent the past decade warning that the GOP-controlled legislature was ruining our economy and reputation by failing to “invest” enough in government. Their left-wing counterparts in fiscally conservative Florida and Texas were saying the same things at the same time.

By no means have we solved all our economic problems. With regard to the willingness of individuals, families, and businesses to relocate to North Carolina and other market-friendly states, however, those Chicken-Little warnings proved to be wildly off the mark — and went entirely unnoticed by the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gladly moved here in the meantime, including 89,000 in just the past year.

Our sky was, it seems, never falling.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When I set out a couple of years ago to write my first novel, a historical fantasy called Mountain Folk, I decided to set most the action during the American Revolution. It’s my favorite period in American history. After all, I’m a native North Carolinian — which means I grew up surrounded by reminders of our nation’s founding era.

Our most-populous city, Charlotte, was named after King George III’s wife. It’s the county seat of Mecklenburg, named after Queen Charlotte’s home duchy in Germany. Our third-largest city, Greensboro, was named after General Nathaniel Greene, who commanded the Patriots’ southern field army during the final stage of the Revolutionary War. His name also adorns the city of Greenville and nearby Greene County.

Ranked fourth in population, Winston-Salem was half-named for another Revolutionary War hero, Joseph Winston, who served under Greene at the pivotal 1781 battle of Guilford Court House. As for Fayetteville, sixth in population, its namesake was the Marquis de Lafayette, the dashing French officer who served under George Washington at several key engagements, including Yorktown.

Here are some other founding-era personalities whose names now grace counties or municipalities in North Carolina:

• Samuel Ashe. A native of Beaufort, Ashe practiced law before going into the “family business” of politics. Both his father and uncle had served as speakers of the North Carolina House. During the run-up to the Revolutionary War, Samuel Ashe served in the North Carolina Provincial Congress and helped draft the new state’s constitution. Then he was elected to the North Carolina Senate, where he served as that chamber’s first speaker. In 1795, the legislature elected him to the first of three one-year terms as governor. Asheville, Asheboro, and Ashe County all bear his name.

• Griffith Rutherford. Born in Ireland and emigrating to North Carolina via Philadelphia (as many backcountry families did), Rutherford got his first taste of military service as a militia captain during the French and Indian War. Like Ashe, he served in the Provincial Congress that wrote the North Carolina constitution. Elected brigadier general of the Patriot militia in the Salisbury District, Rutherford then led the devastating 1776 raid against the British-allied Cherokees.

Later, he commanded troops at battles in Georgia and the Carolinas. Wounded during America’s 1780 defeat at Camden, Rutherford was captured and held as a prisoner of war in Florida for a year. After the war, Rutherford served in both houses of the new legislature. His name adorns Rutherford County and its county seat, Rutherfordton.

• Cornelius Harnett. Born in Chowan County, Harnett became a leading merchant in Wilmington and served as a town commissioner. He twice represented the area in the North Carolina House, first in 1754 and then again on the eve of the war in 1775. He served as the first president of the North Carolina Provincial Council, essentially the executive branch of the new government, and then represented North Carolina in the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1779.

In early 1781, the British captured Wilmington. Some redcoats reportedly grabbed the congressman and threw him “across a horse like a sack of meal.” Harnett’s health deteriorated rapidly. Although the British released him in April, Harnett died shortly thereafter. Harnett County was named after this martyr to the cause.

• Edward Buncombe. Born on what is now the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, Buncombe came to North Carolina in 1768 after inheriting a plantation on the Albemarle Sound. He was elected colonel of the 5th North Carolina Regiment and fought in the Continental Army. Like Rutherford at Camden, Buncombe was wounded and captured during another British victory, this one at Germantown in 1777.

His battlefield wound wasn’t immediately fatal. But a few months later, Buncombe went walking in his sleep, fell down a flight of stairs, and reopened his wounds, causing his death. From him, we got not only the name of Buncombe County but, indirectly, the word “bunk,” meaning a load of nonsense. That must remain, however, a tale for another day.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When the news broke on January 3 that one of North Carolina’s largest school districts, Cumberland County, was considering a shift to virtual instruction in response to rising case counts of the Omicron variant, I felt my stomach lurch.

Again? I asked myself. Are we really going to make the same mistake over and over, hoping against all evidence that the outcome will be different this time?

The reassuring answer, at least from school officials in Cumberland, was no. A day later, they decided to resume in-person classes as planned. As far as I know, other North Carolina districts are staying the course, as well, adopting the model that most charter and private schools did last year: take COVID seriously, take reasonable precautions, but don’t shut your doors to those who need your essential services.

There remains plenty of room for debate about various policy responses to the pandemic. I’m a big fan of vaccines, for example, but opposed to federal mandates I view as unconstitutional. I also doubt that even legal state mandates and private requirements are cost-beneficial (they may boost vaccination a bit but at the cost of reinforcing the very conspiracy theories that need rebutting). Still, I’m open to hearing good-faith counterarguments.

Similarly, how much do masks of differing materials reduce the risk of transmission? What’s the most efficient way to improve ventilation in closed spaces? Let’s talk.

When it comes to school closures, however, the evidence is now overwhelming that they imposed great economic, educational, and social costs on families while having little effect on COVID hospitalizations or fatalities. Schoolchildren were neither at significant risk of getting seriously ill nor of becoming a major vector of transmission. Indeed, the virus often spread more rapidly outside of schools than inside them.

In May 2020, I wrote that if parents were “comfortable sending their children to school on buses or cars before the COVID-19 pandemic, but now say they are unwilling to send their children back to school — or to gymnastics, band practice, soccer leagues, or swimming pools — until the coronavirus threat is essentially extinguished, I would gently but firmly question whether they have properly assessed the relevant risks.”

You need not take my word for any of this, by the way. That school closures were cost-ineffective in containing the pandemic has become the prevailing wisdom among most experts in America and around the world. It’s certainly the prevailing sentiment now among parents, and among politicians of both parties who seek to avoid the fate Terry McAuliffe suffered in last fall’s gubernatorial election in Virginia.

Just the other day, the New York Times observed that “children face more risk from car rides than COVID.” Precisely.

Public policy is about managing risks, not eliminating them entirely. You only get to do that in imaginary worlds, not real ones. In his classic work Searching for Safety, political scientist Aaron Wildavsky illustrated the point with his “jogger’s dilemma.” At precisely the moment you’re exercising, you raise your risk of a heart attack. But “for the rest of the day, as well as the days in between regular exercise, the body is safer.”

Getting the balance right requires a clear conception of the goal and how best to measure it. Here’s something else I wrote back in May 2020: “The initial mandatory closures of our schools, businesses, and other institutions were not sold as eliminating the threat from COVID-19, either to children or to adults. That is not possible. The threat can only be mitigated somewhat until therapies or vaccines are broadly available, and even then a background risk may remain as it does for many other dangerous illnesses.”

We are rapidly approaching that stage. Effective vaccines are broadly available. Effective therapies soon will be. Yet the disease isn’t going to disappear. Pandemic will become endemic. We’ll be far less likely to become seriously ill or die from it, but the risk will never plummet all the way to zero. Reality intrudes.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Thanks to state Sen. Jeff Jackson bowing out of North Carolina’s Democratic primary, the 2022 field for U.S. Senate is coming into focus. We now have a likely nominee (Cheri Beasley) facing one of three prominent Republican candidates: Pat McCrory, Ted Budd, or Mark Walker.

Each seeks to replace three-term U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, who’s retiring this year. Before winning the seat, Burr served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Budd is a sitting House member, Walker a former member.

You might think the House represents a common path to a Senate seat in North Carolina. I did, too, until I examined the electoral history. It turns out since the 1913 passage of the 17th Amendment, which made senators elected by voters rather than state legislatures, only one person whose highest previous office was U.S. House has ever won a Senate seat. That was Richard Burr himself, in 2004.

Three other North Carolinians winning elections for Senate had previously been congressmen, too: Furnifold Simmons (a senator from 1901 to 1931), Clyde Hoey (1945-1954), and Sam Ervin (1954-1974). But each served in statewide office before their Senate victories: Simmons in the U.S. Senate by legislative election, Hoey as North Carolina’s governor, and Ervin as a justice on the state supreme court. There were also two former congressman, William Umstead (1946-1948) and Jim Broyhill (1986), who got appointed to the nation’s upper chamber but never won a Senate election.

Speaking of Ervin, he represents the path that Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, is now attempting to tread. As for former Gov. Pat McCrory, if he wins he’ll join four other governors in accomplishing such a feat: Hoey, Melville Broughton (1948-1949), Kerr Scott (1954-1958), and Terry Sanford (1986-1993).

Out of the 20 folks who’ve been popularly elected to the Senate from North Carolina, then, most took a political path other than those represented by this year’s major candidates. Like Simmons, Lee Overman (1903-1930) had previously served in the U.S. Senate via legislative election. For Willis Smith (1950-1953), Kay Hagan (2009-2015), and Thom Tillis (2014-present), their highest prior office was state legislator.

Robert Morgan (1975-1981) was the state’s attorney general. Jesse Helms (1973-2003) was a former Raleigh city councilman. Robert Reynolds (1932-1945) had been a district attorney. And six North Carolina members — Josiah Bailey (1931-1946), Everett Jordan (1958-1973), John East (1981-1986), Lauch Faircloth (1993-1999), John Edwards (1999-2005), and Elizabeth Dole (2003-2009) — held no elective office before winning Senate races.

Other than preparing you to win a trivia contest, why do I offer this historical account of our Senate elections? Because it serves to illustrate just how wild and unpredictable North Carolina’s political contests can be.

Why is Burr the only person to leap successfully from U.S. House to U.S. Senate? I don’t see a clear answer to that question. With constant media appearances and elections every two years, House members can build name recognition and strong networks of supporters — but largely within just one part of the state. Politicians elected statewide would seem to have an obvious advantage over them. Still, Hagan and Tillis came straight out of the legislature, and quite a few senators had never run successfully for any office before winning their Senate races.

I suspect our sample size is just too small, and our political conditions too changeable, to come up with any hard-and-fast rules. The broadcast media-driven Senate campaigns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries were vastly different affairs than, say, the Willis Smith-Frank Porter Graham race of 1950. And the truth is that there really haven’t been that many representatives willing to give up usually-safe House seats to run in North Carolina’s usually-competitive Senate contests.

That having been said, I wonder if perhaps the dysfunction now plaguing Congress will make it harder going forward for House members to win statewide. Across the partisan spectrum, voters appear deeply disenchanted with Washington. They may prefer to send a fumigator, not a legislator.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

With the recent announcements of a new Toyota battery plant in Randolph County, a new Fujifilm Diosynth drug plant in Wake County, a large MasterBrand cabinet facility in Kinston, and a big White River Marine operation in New Bern for making saltwater boats, among other projects, North Carolina’s manufacturing sector appears to be thriving.

But ask around and you’ll soon discover that many North Carolinians have a very different perception. “We used to make things here,” they insist, “and now we’re just buying everything from overseas.”

Domestic consumers do, indeed, buy more products made overseas than their parents and grandparents did. That’s undeniable — and nothing to get overly worried about. No one is compelled to buy clothes, electronics, or other goods imported from abroad. Folks do so in order to get the most value for every dollar they spend. Protectionist policies are always and everywhere a conspiracy against the general public, an attempt to foist limited choices and higher prices on households to benefit special-interest groups.

There are other problems with such gloom-and-doom pronouncements about manufacturing. For example, they rely on outdated definitions. What does it mean to be “made overseas”? Products such as smart phones may be assembled in one country out of parts made in many others. And the most-valuable components are often the intellectual property produced disproportionately in America.

Furthermore, it simply is not factual to assert that “we” no longer “make things here.” According to the latest measurements of gross domestic product, manufacturing makes up 17% of North Carolina’s economy. That’s a far-higher share than the national and regional averages, both 11%.

It’s true that manufacturing’s share of GDP used to be higher. As recently as 2005, it comprised 20% of North Carolina’s economy. It’s also true that many fewer North Carolinians work in manufacturing than was true decades ago. That’s mostly a function of manufacturing plants becoming more automated, by the way, not the extent to which plants have migrated elsewhere.

Keep in mind that goods-producing industries inevitably shrink as a share of any developed economy where incomes are rising. Think about it in terms of a hierarchy of needs. When you’re poor, you’re mostly concerned about obtaining adequate food, clothing, and shelter. As your income goes up, you will probably spend more on these and other necessities — buying quality, variety, and perhaps even a bit of conspicuous consumption — but your spending on goods probably won’t rise in proportion to your growing income.

In other words, you’ll begin to substitute services for goods. Instead of buying or fixing your lawn mower, you’ll hire a lawn company. Instead of repeatedly upgrading your wardrobe, you’ll eat out more, go to shows, pursue hobbies, or take vacations. Instead of buying the biggest, flashiest house your credit rating would allow, you’ll prefer to buy more education and medical services for you and your family.

By observing that manufacturing remains a vital segment of North Carolina’s economy, I don’t mean to suggest everything is hunky-dory. Properly measured, average incomes have continued to rise significantly over the past two decades while poverty has continued to fall. Nevertheless, there remain many of our fellow citizens whose living conditions and prospects are poor. And as I’ll discuss in a future column, tens of thousands of working-age North Carolinians are still sitting on the sidelines of the labor market, lacking either the skills or the motivation to fill the jobs available to them.

Manufacturing will never again make up a third or even a quarter of GDP. But it remains a sizable component of America’s economy, and an even-larger share of North Carolina’s. Fostering its vitality requires both public and private investment. Policymakers should build and maintain good roads and expand access to high-quality education and training. By far the biggest lever, however, is private spending on productive assets — plants, equipment, technology, and distribution networks — which policymakers can foster by keeping tax rates low, removing regulatory barriers, and otherwise staying out of the way.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

It’s not personal, it’s just business — or so Facebook assures me.

On this matter, I’m inclined to believe the company (now called Meta by its CEO and nearly a dozen other human beings). That doesn’t make my latest encounter with the social-media giant any less frustrating, however. I just spent many days jumping through its authorization hoops so I could run political ads on a Facebook page I manage. And even after finishing the process, I still had my ad rejected and had to appeal the decision multiple times.

Before you accuse me of burying the lede, let me clarify. I am not abandoning my longtime role as political commentator in order to run for office. I am, of course, unelectable. Thousands of highly opinionated newspaper columns and TV appearances over more than three decades will do that to the best of men, and also to me.

No, what set off Facebook’s alarm was something else entirely. It flagged me as attempting to use boosted posts on a non-political page in order to promote a political cause. That’s a no-no, according to the policies Facebook adopted amidst criticism of the role its ads played in the 2016 election and subsequent controversies.

The company now requires special authorization and disclosures in order to run “ads made by, on behalf of, or about a candidate for public office.” Facebook imposes the same requirements for ads about “social issues” that are “sensitive topics that are heavily debated” and “may influence the outcome of an election or result in/relate to existing or proposed legislation.”

Earlier this year I published my first novel, Mountain Folk. It’s a historical fantasy set during the Revolutionary War. To promote the book, I set up a Facebook page and occasionally spend a few dollars boosting posts about its characters, settings, and themes.

It was one of those boosted posts that Facebook rejected multiple times. The post consisted almost entirely of review excerpts. As best I can determine, this was the offending passage, taken from a magazine review:

“Fairies, elves, dwarves, water maidens, monsters, and more. Soldiers and heroes of the American Revolution. Founding Fathers of our country like Washington and Jefferson. Cherokee and Shawnee women and warriors. A minister turned soldier and politician who is unembarrassed to quote Scripture. Throw all these ingredients into a stew pot of fiction, turn up the burner, and you soon have bubbling on the stove John Hood’s Mountain Folk.”

See the problem? The reviewer described George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as “Founding Fathers of our country.” That could be construed as an implicit endorsement of candidates for public office — assuming Facebook readers possess time machines, that is, or that some evil genius is reanimating the corpses of dead presidents to effect a zombie takeover of the federal government (which would, I admit, be something of an improvement).

Another explanation may be that the post described a Revolutionary War hero as a minister “unembarrassed to quote Scripture.” The role of devout Christians in the founding of the country could be construed as a “sensitive topic,” as could the roles of Cherokee and Shawnee leaders. Or perhaps the post was deemed an attempt to hinder the legislative prospects of the Elf Liberation Act.

Okay, I know perfectly well that algorithms are involved, and that Facebook felt compelled to tighten up its advertising policies after a slew of politically charged attacks by powerful individuals and activist groups. But the absurdity of my case merely serves to illustrate the greater absurdity of the present moment.

Upset by claims you consider baseless or ideas you consider objectionable? The proper remedy is neither government restrictions on political speech nor heavy-handed policies by social-media platforms. Don’t hinder debate. Encourage it. “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead,” Jefferson famously said, “nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Official disclaimer: this is not an endorsement of Washington/Jefferson ’24.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Is the purpose of a university education to prepare graduates to get jobs? I’ve never thought so. But then again, I’ve never thought that going to college should be a near-universal experience.

When universities were first created, their purpose was to educate clergymen, lawyers, and physicians. Thankfully, higher education no longer has such a narrow focus. Still, I am sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that university campuses should be places to pursue rigorous scholarship, to cultivate leaders, and to pursue the life of the mind. To embrace learning for learning’s sake, regardless of any career applications.

That’s not how most students see it, of course, so realism is required. If higher education was primarily about “the life of the mind,” it would be a far smaller sector, and one paid for overwhelmingly by participating families and willing donors, not taxpayers. Instead, colleges and universities have become massive enterprises delivering vocational training along with other services such as entertainment, economic development, and medical care.

Is college “worth it” for those seeking to boost their lifelong earnings? On average, yes — but beware of the fallacy of the average. To say the average college graduate earns 67% more than the average worker with only a high-school diploma is not to say that going to college will boost your income by 67%.

For many young people, the very knowledge, skills, and abilities that help get them into college would help them get better-paying jobs even if they didn’t go to college. Moreover, just because past college graduates may have boosted their incomes — especially by punching their undergraduate tickets on the way to lucrative professions requiring MBAs, MDs, or JDs — doesn’t mean that a marginal student today, considering whether to pursue a four-year degree or some other path after high school, would experience an equivalent gain.

The most important point of all, though, is that no one really gets a generic “university degree.” You get a degree in a particular discipline from a particular institution. When it comes to post-graduation salaries, all campuses and majors are most certainly not created equal.

That’s the message reinforced by a fascinating new study by Preston Cooper, a research fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Combining statistics from a new federal site (CollegeScorecard.ed.gov) with other data, Cooper constructed a model to measure the return on investment (ROI) that students can expect to receive by earning undergraduate degrees from one of the 1,200 institutions in his database.

By ROI, Cooper means the present value of your lifetime earnings minus the earnings you’d likely have earned without the degree minus the cost to you of obtaining the degree. Are some of these values only rough estimates? Of course. That’s still better than excluding them from the analysis.

There are dozens of North Carolina colleges and universities in Cooper’s searchable database, so I’ll provide a few local examples to illustrate the wide range of results. Getting a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from North Carolina State University will, on average, boost your lifetime earnings by a net of $1.13 million. The payoff from a degree in fire protection from UNC-Charlotte is $1.12 million. An economics degree from Duke University generates an eyepopping $2.7 million ROI.

On the other hand, Cooper found that a Duke chemistry degree results in a net loss of $50,000. A psychology degree from High Point University has a negative ROI of $79,000. Dance (-$268,000) and drama (-$332,000) degrees from East Carolina University produce ever-larger losses when comparing costs and payoffs.

This is not an argument against the performing arts, or for everyone trying to major in STEM fields. I happen to know folks with dance and drama degrees who live happy and fulfilling lives. And I know some really bored engineers.

When it comes to college costs and benefits, though, honesty is the best policy. We should help our young people make fully informed choices among a wide spectrum of alternative paths after high school.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

On September 15, I wrote a column responding to President Joe Biden’s announcement of a new federal mandate that large employers, federal contractors, and certain other business establishments require their employees either to be vaccinated or to undergo frequent COVID-19 testing.

“Although an advocate of vaccination,” I stated, “I strongly oppose President Joe Biden’s attempt to force private companies to make vaccination or weekly testing a condition of employment. His order violates fundamental principles of federalism and the separation of powers. It is also a violation of the statutes governing federal rulemaking.”

Many readers disagreed. Of course the president has the authority to impose a vaccine mandate on companies receiving federal contracts or Medicare dollars, my critics insisted, or to impose such a mandate on any private employer via the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Well, so far Biden’s policy has fared poorly in the courts. Two judges struck down the mandate on federal contractors. Two other judges struck down the mandate on medical providers receiving federal funds. And citing both statutory and constitutional violations, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the president’s attempt to use OSHA to compel vaccine compliance at large employers.

The issue here was never the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines or even the legality of vaccine mandates. Under America’s constitutional order, the federal government enjoys only those powers specifically enumerated in the United States Constitution. State governments, however, possess a general “police power” to enact laws to protect “public safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, [and] law and order,” as a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision put it.

In other words, while I might argue on prudential grounds that North Carolina shouldn’t require vaccination against COVID-19 in order to work or go to school, I must grant that our state government does indeed possess the power under the state constitution to impose such rules. I can grant that and still deny that the federal government has or should possess such power.

Whether it be abortion practices, vaccine mandates, utility regulations, school curricula, or a host of other often-controversial issues, my position remains the same: unless the U.S. Constitution specifically grants Congress the power to act, these matters should be left up to state governments to sort out for themselves.

No serious person disputes that within its constitutional purview, federal law reigns supreme. And no serious person disputes that our federal constitution and its duly enacted amendments ensure federal protection of individual rights — speech, press, assembly, trial by jury, etc. — from encroachment by state or local governments. But these cases are supposed to be the exception, not the rule.

Federalizing so many of our political disputes has produced horrible consequences. It makes every presidential or congressional election feel like a high-stakes poker game that no one can afford to lose. It guarantees constant and debilitating chaos. For most of the big political questions we face, there is no one answer that can or should be imposed across our sprawling country by a federal government few of us really trust.

In his brilliant new book I, Citizen: A Blueprint for Reclaiming American Self-Governance, Tony Woodlief calls Washington, D.C. “an imperial city” that resembles more a circus than a capital. The showmen who populate the place clearly want it to remain the center ring of our political life. It serves their interests. But it doesn’t serve ours. Only by devolving power to states, localities, and voluntary institutions can we truly accommodate difference and thus defuse political tensions before they reach the boiling point.

“When real authority resides in communities, citizens are more likely to engage, to express their values and views, to hold government officials accountable, and even to become elected representatives themselves,” writes Woodlief, the executive vice president of State Policy Network (where I serve on the board of directors).

Federal courts have done the right thing in blocking Biden’s vaccine mandates. It’s best to make such policies closer to home. It’s also what our constitutional order requires.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

In places where governments are smaller, taxes are lower, regulations are lighter, and property rights are more secure, people tend to be more generous, trustful, and tolerant. Although progressives may find this proposition hard to accept, there’s an ever-increasing stack of empirical evidence to support it.

Consider a recent study published in The Independent Review. Comparing the scores of 145 countries on the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index to an index of private giving and volunteering, authors Lawrence McQuillan and Hayeon Carol Park found a strongly positive relationship. By itself, the freedom index explained 20% of the variance in charitable giving. Other studies by Swedish economists Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson show powerful connections between economic freedom and measures of social trust, mutual respect, and tolerance.

To discover a correlation, however, is not necessarily to determine which way the causal arrows point. For example, there is already an extensive literature showing that freer economies tend to grow faster. Perhaps as free-market policies help places grow wealthier, their residents become more charitable. Or perhaps as places grow wealthier for other reasons, such as achieving high levels of education and innovation, they both become more charitable and more likely to adopt freedom-enhancing policies.

Still another possibility is that places where civil society is already “thick,” where healthy families and other private institutions help their residents build character and find meaning, citizens tend to be both more economically productive and more resistant to expansive government.

It’s an interesting social-science puzzle. But for my colleagues and I at the John William Pope Foundation, it requires no ultimate solution. For us, it’s enough to know that freedom, human development, compassion, and other important values are associated with each other. They form a virtuous circle. And over the past 35 years, the Pope Foundation has donated more than $200 million to nonprofits found at every point on that circle, from humanitarian relief and civic vitality to think tanks and educational institutions.

Our giving reflects the philosophy of our co-founder, retail pioneer John Pope. “Self-reliance, self-confidence, and integrity are the keys to success,” he said. “Endurance is also critical, and the responsibility for success lies on the shoulders of the individual.” Our virtuous-circle approach to philanthropy also reflects the wisdom of America’s Founders, whose fierce defense of freedom came not just from classical learning and Enlightenment principles but also from practical experience.

As George Washington put it, “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” But neither Washington nor his colleagues believed liberty was an all-encompassing good. They recognized — as have prudent conservators of America’s classical-liberal revolution ever since — that it will always prove fleeting unless it’s bundled with the complementary good of virtue.

Of course, the two values can also be in tension. When government respects our freedom to seek virtue, we may instead practice vice. Human beings are inherently flawed creatures vulnerable to temptations. Yielding to them can create the very adverse consequences for ourselves and others — addiction, corruption, violence, child abuse and neglect — that so often lead to demands for more government.

That’s why building and maintaining strong social institutions are so important. When we exercise our personal freedom within dense networks of families and other associations, we make better choices. We’re nudged in the right direction by words loving or stern, by glances approving or reproachful, by examples inspiring or cautionary.

When the Pope Foundation invests in life-changing programs to combat poverty, illiteracy, addiction, and homelessness, we help to create the conditions most likely to preserve freedom. And when we invest in thinkers, communicators, and institutions that strengthen the intellectual and moral case for freedom, we make it possible for more individuals to pursue their passions, live their best lives, and build virtue — including, as it happens, the virtue of charity itself.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Can I let you in on a not-so-little secret? The Democrats in Washington don’t really mean it. The Republicans don’t, either.

To be more specific, they don’t really mean what they say about debt and deficits. Democrats, fully cognizant of how tenuously they control Congress, are trying to shove through trillions of dollars in new federal spending before the 2022 election cycle begins. They claim either that tax hikes on the wealthy can pay for it, or that adding trillions more to the federal debt will have no significant downsides. They know — or, at least, the staffers who feed them their talking points know — that neither of their claims is true.

Back when Republicans held their own congressional majorities, they ran up massive deficits, too, in part by enacting tax cuts without offsetting budget savings. They claimed either that the tax cuts would be so economically stimulative they’d pay for themselves in future revenue gains, or that the resulting deficits could be managed simply by cutting out waste, fraud, abuse, and bureaucracy. They knew — or, at least, the staffers who fed them their talking points knew — that neither of their claims was true.

The facts are as follows. The Democrats couldn’t pay for all their spending promises even if they essentially confiscated all the wealth of today’s billionaires and shot income-tax rates into the stratosphere. The math doesn’t work.

As for borrowing, publicly held federal debt already exceeds 100% of our GDP. Based on the preponderance of empirical research, including the findings of 36 of 40 scholarly studies on the topic published since 2010, more federal borrowing will significantly harm future economic growth.

On the Republican side, reducing tax rates on work, savings, and investment does, indeed, boost long-term growth. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was, on balance, a good plan. But its stimulative effects were never going to be large enough and fast enough to replenish federal coffers.

The fiscally conservative thing to do, then, was to offset the budgetary impact of the tax cuts with spending restraint. Why didn’t Republicans do that? Because it was hard work. Nips and tucks wouldn’t suffice.

The vast majority of federal spending consists of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements received by large swaths of the population. If presidents and lawmakers aren’t willing to make substantial changes to these programs, then they aren’t truly willing to make substantial reductions in federal spending.

In a moment of Yogi Berra-like insight, the economist Herbert Stein once observed that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Federal spending is not a perpetual-motion machine. At some point in the not-too-distant future, and especially when interest rates rise from their historic lows, it will no longer be feasible to finance federal deficits with borrowing. Then, one of two things will happen.

One possibility is that the then-president and Congress will enact a very large and essentially permanent increase in federal taxation. While the resulting package will push the top income-tax rate well north of 50%, most of the revenue will have to come from middle-income taxpayers, likely in the form of a national sales or value-added tax. That will make us look more like European countries, where the tax burden on the wealthy isn’t much different from ours but the tax burden on everyone else is much heavier.

The other possibility is to rein in Social Security payments, Medicare, and other entitlement spending — but primarily for upper-income recipients. In a recent Manhattan Institute paper, economist Brian Riedl made a compelling case that this response might draw bipartisan support. “Before lawmakers endanger the economy and limit their future policy flexibility by drastically raising taxes on upper-income families,” he wrote, “they can promote their redistributive goals simply by cutting federal spending on the rich.”

Neither of these options is optimal. Both will be unpopular. The politicians in Washington know that, too, which is why they aren’t telling you about them — yet.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When then-Congressman Jim Martin ran for governor in 1984, he sought to combine Reagan-era thinking about free markets with the practical approach to government he’d learned two decades earlier as commission chairman of North Carolina’s most-populous county, Mecklenburg.

Like many other southerners of his generation, Martin had switched from Democrat to Republican because of his belief that Washington was doing too many things that the Constitution had properly reserved to states, localities, and the people themselves — and that, not coincidentally, Washington was making a mess of them. But simply opposing federal encroachment in such areas as education and transportation wasn’t sufficient, he knew. Republicans needed a vision for how states and localities could deliver these services effectively.

A victorious Martin would eventually call his philosophy “constructive conservatism.” I think that’s as good a label as any to affix to the state budget just passed by the Republican-led General Assembly and signed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper.

The conservative elements are unmistakable. State spending will, once again, grow no faster than the combined rates of inflation and population increase. The budget initiates another round of pro-growth tax cuts that, when fully implemented, will reduce our tax rate on personal income to 3.99%, down from 5.25%, and eliminate our corporate tax altogether.

That’s the overall architecture of the new budget, and it counts as a significant conservative victory. So does the budget’s expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship program for families choosing private schools for their children. Regarding the constitutional separation of powers, the bill clarifies that the governor does not possess the unilateral power to declare perpetual emergencies. After 30 days, an emergency declaration goes away unless extended by a vote of the Council of State. The bill also clarifies that the attorney general cannot encroach on legislative prerogatives by purporting to “settle” lawsuits against the General Assembly to achieve a policy outcome that the attorney general may like but lawmakers do not.

At the same time, North Carolina’s new spending plan directs money to high-priority functions and agencies of state government. Public employees truly needed raises, of course, and some of the biggest increases went to areas where recruitment and retention problems pose grave risks to the public, including probation, parole, and corrections officers.

Several years ago, the legislature created the NC Promise program to foster enrollment growth at Western Carolina University, Elizabeth City State University, and UNC-Pembroke by capping tuition at $1,000 a year for in-state students and $5,000 for out-of-state students. The concept resembled an idea championed years before by the aptly named James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal: creating tuition tiers to distribute students and programs more efficiently and equitably across the UNC system. The new 2021-22 budget adds a fourth campus, Fayetteville State University, to NC Promise.

Perhaps the most “constructive” part of the new spending plan is how it makes use of billions of dollars in one-time money — federal dollars, reverted funds, and revenue collections — that a less-responsible General Assembly might have used to fund the ongoing operations of government. When you pay for recurring expenses with a windfall, you guarantee either an imperiled program or a tax increase.

Instead, the legislature put $6 billion over the next two years into the State Capital Infrastructure Fund (SCIF) as well as directly funding hundreds of millions of dollars in additional projects. Lawmakers also added $3.1 billion to the state’s rainy-day fund, $800 million to a separate reserve for emergencies and natural disasters, and $50 million to a savings account for future health-plan expenses.

While I’m not sold on all the capital projects fund by the new budget, most appear to fund the construction or renovation of valuable infrastructure. Practitioners of constructive conservatism have always recognized the importance of investing in capital assets that move people, freight, energy, and information or that facilitate the delivery of critical services.

Monopoly, waste, and excessive debt are what such conservatives oppose. The new budget reflects their values.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The state of Washington has it. California has it. Michigan has it. Oklahoma has it. Nebraska has it. Arizona has it. Florida, New Hampshire, and Idaho have a version of it.

Within the next few years, North Carolina will have it, too: a legal prohibition against the use of race or sex as a factor in hiring public employees, awarding government contracts, or admitting students to universities. This will happen either through a U.S. Supreme Court decision, a law passed by the General Assembly, or a constitutional amendment approved by North Carolina voters.

It’s important for those in positions of power across our state to understand and accept this inevitability. I fear that they do not, that they are in for a rude awakening when their power to make decisions based on race or other extraneous characteristics will be irrevocably taken from them.

They interpret “affirmative action” to mean, for example, admitting black students with lower grades and test scores into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill instead of Asian students with higher grades and test scores. They interpret it to mean they can announce a racial, ethnic, or gender target when hiring employees or awarding contracts and then preferring some applicants over others in an attempt to meet that goal.

By their definition, however, affirmative action is unjust and unpopular. Very few people believe government should either discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, or national identity.

According to the latest Civitas Poll for the John Locke Foundation, two-thirds of North Carolinians support a proposed constitutional amendment to clarify that such conduct is illegal. Only 15% oppose it. There were no significant differences of opinion on this question among racial and ethnic groups in our state. If such an amendment is placed on the North Carolina ballot, it will pass easily.

That doesn’t mean North Carolinians believe equality has been fully achieved. It doesn’t mean they oppose all remedies for inequality. Indeed, most North Carolinians continue to support affirmative action when it is precisely and corrected defined as expanding access to the applicant pool for jobs, contracts, and university admissions.

For instance, most North Carolinians want public agencies to take affirmative action to ensure that all potentially interested parties know about any scholarships, programs, and job openings that may be available. Most want public agencies to produce applications, forms, and marketing materials in multiple languages and distribute them widely.

Most would also likely support race-neutral means of pursuing diversity at exclusive universities by, for example, admitting a set percentage of top performers from all high schools across the state. I’m not a fan of this policy myself, but it does have the virtue of avoiding the pernicious practice of sorting young people by crude racial categories and then mixing and matching them like pieces on a gameboard.

Defenders of preferences have always defamed their adversaries as bigots. They will continue to do so, though the defamation obviously changes no minds and solves no problems.

It is true that our society has yet to achieve full equality of opportunity. While some statistical differences in incomes, wealth, and living standards reflect differences in individual preferences or cultural norms, others persist because too many of our young people lack stable families, effective schools, and affordable housing in safe neighborhoods. Bad public policies are partly to blame, which means good public policies can, indeed, promote equal opportunity.

Of course, we don’t all define those “bad” and “good” public policies the same way. Left, Right, and Center will continue to disagree about how to expand access to the American Dream. When it comes to using race or sex preferences in hiring, contracting, and admissions, however, the vast majority of us already decided the practice is unfair and counterproductive.

Two of the three most-populous states in our country have already ended such preferences. North Carolina will soon join them. Time to accept reality and move on.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law on November 15 attracted the votes of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington and has attracted praise from many North Carolina leaders, as well — once more illustrating the fact that bad ideas can also be popular ideas.

The bill is bad because it’s misleading (only about half of the total, $550 billion, represents truly new spending). It’s bad because it’s unconstitutional (the federal government was never supposed to be so heavily involved in purely local and regional infrastructure). And it’s bad because it’s wasteful (all the federal strings attached to the funds, including union-scale wage requirements, will make the investment far less efficient than if states and localities funded the projects themselves).

As with other government services, it is a mistake to equate dollars spent with value added. For example, the bill includes $110 billion for roads and bridges and $105 billion for rail and transit. The relative proportions are absurd. Dollars spent on highways are far more productive than dollars spent on transit or Amtrak.

Even within the highway category, some states are going to spend the dollars prudently and others poorly. North Carolina, as it happens, will likely perform comparatively well. Although our Department of Transportation has recently struggled to produce accurate forecasts of future projects, changes in the state’s funding formulas and procedures have significantly boosted the productivity of our highway investments over the past decade.

A California-based think tank, the Reason Foundation, conducts an annual study of the cost-effectiveness of state highway systems. As recently as 2016, North Carolina ranked 17th in the study (which the think tank I used to head, the John Locke Foundation, published for a number of years before Reason took the baton). The latest edition, which draws on 2019 data, ranks North Carolina fifth in the nation.

Reason’s ranking system incorporates both cost and value measures. North Carolina keeps its per-mile administrative expenses modest (11th lowest) while the condition of our pavement is rather good (8th best for rural roads and 10th for interstates and urban roads). Our fatality rates are close to the national average, as is traffic congestion in our urban areas (which actually constitutes an improvement from years ago). North Carolina’s worst performance (39th) is for the share of bridges that are structurally deficient.

Care to take a guess at which states get the least bang for their highway bucks? Yep, for the most part it’s the usual suspects: California (45th), New York (46th), and New Jersey (50th), plus the hard-to-build-in states of Hawaii (47th) and Alaska (48th). Florida (41st), as it happens, fares poorly in this area, too, while Texas (16th) is significantly above average.

That states vary so widely in the cost-effectiveness of their highway spending is a major reason for Washington to butt out of it — and, for the most part, out of infrastructure funding more broadly.

Back when presidents and congresses cared about such constitutional niceties, more than half a century ago, they justified the federal interstate highway system as a defense measure to ensure that troops and materiel could be moved rapidly across the country in case of attack. There remains a similar justification for some federal spending on infrastructure, to be sure — to make sure we have secure lines for transmitting information and energy during wartime, for example.

But the vast majority of the benefits of roads, bridges, transit, broadband networks, and water systems will accrue to those who live near and make use of those systems on a regular basis. They ought to pay for them, with some combination of user charges and taxes, and their elected local and state representatives should be the ones making decisions about infrastructure needs, investments, and operations.

Removing these responsibilities to Washington doesn’t turn the resulting projects into free gifts. It merely socializes cost and reduces efficiency. North Carolinians would be better off if the federal infrastructure bill had never passed.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When Carolina Journal first reported first-term U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s intention to abandon his current district next year to run in an adjacent one, CJ quoted Cawthorn as saying his decision was part of “a strategy to increase conservativism in North Carolina.”

Here’s what Cawthorn said in a subsequent video making it official: “Knowing the political realities of the 13th District, I am afraid that another establishment, go-along-to-get-along Republican would prevail there.”

The “establishment Republican” Cawthorn was calling out was clearly N.C. Rep. Tim Moore, who’d been widely expected to seek the Republican nomination in the new 13th District stretching from the mountains to the Charlotte suburbs. To label Moore a “go-along-to-get-along Republican” is, among other things, to reveal an embarrassing ignorance of how legislative chambers work. Moore is the longtime speaker of the N.C. House. At worst, other GOP lawmakers may “go along” to “get along” with him.

Of course, one regularly finds the words “embarrassing” and “ignorance” in the same sentence as the name of the freshman congressman from Western North Carolina. Madison Cawthorn is a callow and appallingly ignorant young man who regularly embarrasses conservatives and Republicans, whether they admit it or not.

My indignation about this episode, however, isn’t primarily directed at Cawthorn, who is likely a pawn in some broader (and sillier) scheme hatched by others. What appalls me is that out-of-state operatives are using him as a vessel to trash the very real accomplishments of conservative governance in our state. You can see the same dynamic in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate, with the Club for Growth and other supporters of U.S. Rep. Ted Budd sliming former Gov. Pat McCrory as “unprincipled” with “a record of failure.”

Many North Carolina conservatives, myself included, have disagreed with McCrory, Moore, and other GOP leaders from time to time. But you’d have to be living under a rock, or perhaps in some faraway beachfront resort, not to be aware of and appreciate their role in enacting some of the most far-reaching and successful conservative reforms in recent American history.

These leaders and their colleagues cut state taxes multiple times. The new state budget will phase out North Carolina’s corporate rate entirely. Since 2010, state spending has fallen significantly as a share of the state’s economy. Thanks to a thriving charter sector and an expanding voucher program, North Carolina parents have more school choice than ever before. During McCrory’s tenure, the state substantially reformed its system for financing infrastructure and curtailed costly regulations. Those are only some of the entries on a long list of victories.

Such victories, and the practical experience that comes with them, are the building blocks of a successful political movement with the goal and capability of governing North Carolina and the rest of the country. Soundbites and clickbait, on the other hand, build little except fundraising lists.

Speaking of which, the off-stage grifters and demagogues who’d like to portray Tim Moore as a do-nothing squish and Madison Cawthorn as a conservative champion seem to think they’ve mastered the art of political manipulation. Moore did, after all, bow out of a potential primary fight in the 13th District and announced that he would seek another term in the legislature — and as speaker of the house.

Mission accomplished? Depends on the mission you have in mind. The most-despised institution in American government right now is Congress. Hard-core partisans appreciate their own party’s members, perhaps, but a broad swath of voters from the center-left to the center-right view our federal legislature as a circus of ponderous pachyderms, braying jackasses, and clueless clowns.

Although some may think otherwise, a feckless and disreputable Congress is a threat to limited, constitutional government. It concedes too much power to the executive and judicial branches. Our republic has grave problems — the impending bankruptcy of our entitlement state being a prime example — that only legislation can address.

Having more members with practical legislative experience will help. Incessant tweeting will not.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The COVID-19 crisis had enormous and destructive consequences for our health, our economy, our education systems, and the quality of our social and family lives. Now, just imagine how much worse the consequences would have been in the absence of modern information and computer technology (ICT).

In response both to the pandemic itself and to the government restrictions that followed, many more businesses would have been forced to cut back, suspend operations, or close down permanently. Vastly more workers would have lost their jobs. Basic goods and services would have been far harder to come by.

Rather than receiving critical care, advice, and diagnosis through telemedicine, many patients with chronic or life-threatening illnesses would have been largely cut off from the health care system. Rather than receiving often-substandard distance learning, many students would have received little instructional of any kind. And rather than keeping in touch with friends and family through video chats and emails, many of our fellow North Carolinians would have become even more isolated and depressed than they already were.

With regard to the economic benefits of ICT, at least, we need not imagine the alternative. Janice Eberly of Northwestern University, Jonathan Haskel of Imperial College London, and Paul Mizen of Nottingham University have coauthored a new study that models the counterfactual scenario of a COVID crisis without modern technology to soften its blows by enabling home-based work. They estimate that the absence of ICT-enabled working from home, our gross domestic product would have fallen about twice as much as it did during the first few months of the pandemic.

Eberly, Haskel, and Mizen use the term “potential capital” to describe the residences and other home-related assets that workers and their employers could tap with ICT to sustain business operations. It’s a useful description.

Think about the long stretches of time that your house, or at least parts of your house, remain vacant during a normal day. Think about the various infrastructure networks that lead to and from your house, as well as the furnishings and equipment that fill it. Unless you already worked from home before COVID, you probably made only minor and occasional use of these assets to produce goods or services for sale. During the pandemic, they became essential tools for delivering value and earning income.

There is, of course, nothing new about home-based work. The distinction between “home” and “work” is a modern one. Most of our ancestors either farmed the land around their dwellings (whether they owned it or not), made cloth or other goods in their home as part of the “putting-out system,” or practiced trades out of or next to where they lived.

I don’t believe even future generations of technology will erase all boundaries between workplace and homeplace, or that such an outcome would be a good thing. But I do think that the COVID crisis, as disastrous as it proved to be, will have some net-positive effects on how we choose to structure our economic and social lives. More jobs, though certainly not most jobs, will be filled by workers commuting to an external office or workplace only a day or two a week, if at all. That, in turn, will get far more cars off the roads — alleviating congestion and reducing emissions — than mass-transit boosters could ever hope to achieve.

More broadly, I think this experience will serve to underline the critical importance of resiliency. Business leaders will build more reliable supply chains. Energy companies and policymakers who regulate them will prioritize keeping the lights on over more-politicized considerations. Parents will pay more attention not just to how their current schools are run but also to what alternatives they may have if they become dissatisfied. Prudent educators will respond accordingly.

Anything of value has a cost. Innovation may reduce it significantly, but the cost will never be zero. Resiliency may sometimes look like redundancy or even timidity. When the crisis arrives, however, it’s a real bargain.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I got inspired while trashing one of my newspaper columns.

Nothing new about that. As a longtime syndicated columnist for North Carolina newspapers, I have provided numerous readers with the opportunity to inspire themselves by trashing columns of mine — or so I’ve heard. My correspondents been dutiful in reporting their inspirational experiences to me, often in graphic detail.

In this case, however, my inspiration came not from the realization that something I wrote might deserve to be trashed. I’d already had that realization decades ago after penning one of my first columns, when its subject complained to me that I’d misquoted him, misunderstood his point, and even misspelled his name. Other than that, it seems, the article was decidedly mediocre.

No, when I say I got inspired while trashing an old column, I mean that literally. I was in the office of a former employer, going through old file boxes and deciding what to save and what to toss. As I flung a tattered newspaper clipping into the garbage can, it occurred to me that I ought to tally up all the pieces I’d written since my column made its debut in the summer of 1986.

I was then enrolled in the University of North Carolina journalism school, which had helped place me in a summer internship at the Spring Hope Enterprise. I ended up working for the Enterprise off and on for the next two years as I completed my undergraduate degree and then prepared to leave North Carolina for my first full-time job in Washington. During those two years I covered town councils, county commissions, and school boards. I wrote features. I laid out pages. I even drove the finished product to a nearby city, Wilson, where the Enterprise was printed.

And I wrote a weekly political column. I kept it up even after departing for the nation’s capital. I added a second paper, then a third. When the think tank I helped to found, the John Locke Foundation, opened its doors, I began marketing the column more energetically across the state, hitting the road for days at a time to visit editors and learn what kind of content might interest them.

It didn’t take long to figure out the right angle. Most said something to the effect of “go local, young man.” Even in those pre-Internet days, editors were awash in syndicated columns and op-eds about national and international affairs. They got far fewer submissions about North Carolina. So, I narrowed my focus. It was a good call. It still is. Dozens of newspapers now run my column regularly.

I wrote it once a week from 1986 to 2014, after which I switched the frequency to twice a week. By my count, then, I have written about 2,200 columns. At an average of 700 words each (they’re a bit shorter than that now, but used to run closer to 750), I estimate these columns contained approximately 1,540,000 words in total. That’s more than 10 times the word count of my longest book, Mountain Folk.

When I first computed the number, what sprang to mind was the scene in the 1984 film Amadeus when the Emperor of Austria is asked to critique a Mozart composition. “Your work is ingenious,” he tells young Wolfgang. “It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Cut a few and it will be perfect.”

The composer calls the emperor’s response absurd, and rightly so. I am, alas, more of a Salieri than a Mozart. Tightening my copy would likely have improved it.

Nevertheless, I hope my readers have enjoyed my columns and learned something from them from time to time. I certainly have. Nearly all have focused on North Carolina issues, places, or politicians. And although I’ve occasionally lost my cool, I’ve tried to engage in civil and constructive discourse.

If that last sentence made you snort — you’re welcome. I thought my critics might need a little “inspiration” today.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Although some pundits and grifters may claim otherwise, there’s nothing new about populism. It comes in waves, often but not always in response to sharp economic downturns, and is driven by outrage against the mistakes or misdeeds of political elites.

Sometimes that populist outrage is well-earned and its consequences beneficial. At other times, though, the flames of populism serve as little more than propulsion for demagogues seeking to make themselves new political elites in place of the old ones. George Orwell had their number, which he counted as legs. So did Pete Townshend of The Who, who invited listeners to “meet the new boss — same as the old boss.”

If you go looking for clear definitions of the policy content of populism, you’ll come away disappointed. But there’s a common rhetorical denominator: populists tend to say things like “the People have spoken” even though they are actually in the minority and “the People” have done no such thing.

It’s currently fashionable to denigrate right-wing populism, of the sort that produced the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Although I’m no slave to fashion — my closet is full of clothes older than my grown children — I have repeatedly criticized such populist impulses myself, not only when expressed as conspiracy theories about stolen elections but also when directed against free trade, entitlement reform, and other causes that in my view cannot be abandoned by an American conservatism worthy of the name.

Today, however, I will focus on left-wing populism, of the sort that has produced its own violence and chaos but nowhere near the level of condemnation it deserves.

The riots of 2020 alone resulted in dozens of deaths and north of $1 billion in property damage. Of course, most people protesting the homicide of George Floyd were only expressing political views. They weren’t rioters. By refusing to maintain order, however, state and local governments allowed some protests to devolve into riots. It was a colossal error.

This manifest failure to enforce basic rules of conduct in public spaces had antecedents. Some happened right here in North Carolina. On August 24, 2017, a mob led by anarchist and communist activists toppled the Confederate Monument that once stood in front of Durham’s old courthouse. Thanks to some combination of clumsiness and purposeful malfeasance by local law enforcement, no one was ever really held responsible for the crime.

Almost exactly one year later, another mob (including some of the same activists) tore down the Silent Sam statue on the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina. Again, there were no serious consequences for those responsible. Again, the mob was rewarded by having the statue removed permanently rather than restored to its original location, as it should have been, until such time that it might be removed by proper authorities employing legal means.

As I wrote at the time, I was never sold on keeping those statues permanently in place. I don’t think past generations get to decide in perpetuity what persons or images should populate campuses, courthouses, and other public spaces. Confederate monuments have a history of their own, one that at best mixes familial desire to honor fallen ancestors with Lost Cause mythology and white supremacy.

Should Silent Sam and comparable statues and memorials have been moved elsewhere, then, or just dismantled? That was a legitimate question. It was not, however, answered by “The People.” It was answered by a self-anointed few who figured they’d get away with it. They were right.

Most North Carolinians didn’t agree. They opposed removing the Silent Sam statue, which was on state property. That remains the prevailing national sentiment about the larger issue, as far as I know. In a 2020 ABC News/Washington Post poll, for example, only 43% of respondents favored “removing statues honoring Confederate generals from public places.”

Think the majority is wrong about this? Then persuade them otherwise. But don’t take the law into your own hands and then cloak yourself in populist claims that “the People have spoken.” They never got to.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Republicans in much of the country enjoyed significant success during the 2021 election cycle. They elected a GOP governor in Virginia, almost elected one in New Jersey, won several important judicial races in Pennsylvania, and even elected their first Republican candidate to local office in Seattle (city attorney) since the 1980s.

In most of these places, voter turnout was up from previous off-year cycles — a fact that politicos, in particular, ought to take to heart.

Too many have bought into the widespread assumption that lower turnout tends to benefit Republicans and higher turnout tends to benefit Democrats. This assumption reflects little more than political folklore. It’s not a proposition supported by empirical evidence.

For me, the folk tale dissipated many years ago when I took a look at the turnouts and outcomes for U.S. Senate races in North Carolina and discovered no consistent relationship between the two variables — even though I’d been assured repeatedly, by operatives in both parties, that Republicans liked to run negative ads against their opponents not so much to swing undecided voters their way but simply to turn voters off so they wouldn’t show up, thus giving the GOP an edge by Election Day.

All I did, admittedly, was run a simple test for correlation across data from a single category of races in a single state. More sophisticated models are needed to test the broader proposition that low turnouts help Republicans, models that include lots of other variables from multiple jurisdictions and then attempt to adjust for them. Scholars have now published dozens of such rigorous studies. While the results aren’t unanimous, they tend to undermine the conventional wisdom.

Daron Shaw of the University of Texas and John Petrocik of the University of Missouri summarized much of this research in their 2020 book The Turnout Myth. “Seventy years of survey data and election outcomes suggest that turnout has no systematic partisan consequences,” they concluded. Among other findings, they discovered that “the candidate preference of those most likely to vote and those least likely to vote is almost indistinguishable.”

It’s not that a pro-Democratic tilt to higher turnout was a ridiculous notion, by the way. On average, Republicans tended to be more likely to vote than Democrats. And in North Carolina, especially, there were way more registered Democrats than registered Republicans. It seemed plausible, then, that efforts to register voters and make it easier for them to cast ballots — the introduction of early voting, for example — would net more Democratic than Republican votes, therefore flipping competitive races to the blue column.

Still, plausible isn’t provable. It turned out that this pervasive turnout myth was based on overly simplistic analysis. For one thing, that big Democratic edge in voter registration has been shrinking since the 1980s. For another, even if Democratic-leaning folks outnumber Republican-leaning folks in the pool of available non-voters, that doesn’t necessarily mean making it easier to register and vote will have comparable effects on these two groups. In other words, everything else being equal, perhaps the Republican-leaning bystanders will be more likely to respond to your policy changes and join the electorate. (Yes, Democrats are more likely to vote early, but the vast majority of them were going to vote, anyway. That’s redistributive, not additive.)

The more you read studies about political behavior, the quirkier it looks. For example, a new paper in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties examined the turnout effects of sending postcards to voters in state legislative districts. The authors found that the postcards likely reduced rather than increased turnout in those districts, perhaps by pulling the attention of low-propensity voters away from marquee campaigns towards legislative races that didn’t excite them as much.

Elections can certainly turn on turnout differentials between the two major party coalitions, differentials that may reflect tactical choices or issue salience at the time. But overall turnout is not predictive of who wins elections. Please discard this myth and adjust accordingly.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

A year ago, would you have correctly guessed that meetings of local school boards would be among the most politically charged events of 2021, and that school-board races would be among the most contested of the next election cycle? If so, more power to you. I would have gotten those questions wrong.

That’s not to say I mind it. The issues involved matter a lot: school curriculum, fiscal responsibility, COVID-era shutdowns and regulations. School boards have long deserved more public attention. In fact, I’ve become such a fan of local school-board meetings that I think we should increase their frequency — by creating more local school boards.

North Carolina’s school systems are abnormally large. We have just 115 districts. That’s far lower than in such similarly populated states as Georgia (180), Pennsylvania (500), Michigan (537), New Jersey (564), and Ohio (610).

Over time, most states have been reducing their school-district counts. The arguments for consolidation included lower administrative costs, savings from bulk purchases of goods and services, greater socioeconomic diversity, and less confusion among parents and taxpayers.

Some of these benefits were, in fact, realized — but primarily by merging tiny districts with a few hundred students into modestly sized districts with a few thousand students. While there is some debate about the precise inflection point, I think a fair reading of the available evidence is that beyond that point, consolidating districts is counterproductive. It results in a diseconomy of scale, raising rather than lowering the cost of school operations. It also appears to harm student performance, everything else being equal.

When I say there is some debate about the inflection point, I mean that some researchers think it’s around 2,000 to 4,000 students. Others think it’s in the low tens of thousands. Alas, North Carolina’s largest systems exceed these thresholds. Wake County’s district enrolls nearly 160,000 students. Charlotte-Mecklenburg has 140,000. Guilford (69,000), Forsyth (51,000), and Cumberland (49,000) are also quite big.

While I have long advocated dividing the gargantuan Wake and Mecklenburg systems into three or four districts, I’m open to the idea that the other urban systems should be subdivided, as well. My main argument has long been that giving parents more choices among district-run public schools would improve academic quality and the return on taxpayer investment.

Two recent studies show the promise of such a strategy. In a 2017 paper, Katie Sharron of Florida State University and Lawrence Kenny of the University of Florida exploited the fact that some states require there to be only one school district per county while others impose no such requirement. That allows for a robust test of whether school-district competition has educational benefits. “We find strong evidence that restricting competition among public school districts has an adverse impact on student learning,” they found.

A 2019 paper in the Journal of Education Finance used Pennsylvania as the focal state. Examining a range of financial and outcome data, the authors concluded that the cost-optimal enrollment for a district was 6,000 to 7,000 students. In Pennsylvania, there are many tiny districts far below that threshold. In North Carolina, our major problem is that we have some sprawling districts far above it.

Over the past few months, friction between parents and school boards has illustrated yet another argument for creating more districts: it may ensure a better alignment of values. Don’t like how your local district schools handled COVID, or what they may be teaching your children? Complain if you like, but that may not yield timely or satisfactory results.

Another reasonable response to the problem would be to put your children in another nearby district where the school board’s policies better fit your own. That would be a lot easier to accomplish if there were more such districts to choose from, at least within North Carolina’s largest metropolitan areas. More districts would mean, of course, more school boards and more elections to fill those school boards. I can live with that. What about you?

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

As they witness rapidly escalating costs for building, buying, and maintaining homes, the vast majority of North Carolinians clearly want their leaders to do something about affordable housing.

What that something ought to be, however, remains far from clear.

In a recent Elon University survey, for example, 66% of respondents agreed that North Carolina leaders should “allow the free market to deal with housing costs without government involvement.” At the same time, 61% of respondents said North Carolina should “increase government spending to support housing costs.”

A flat-out contradiction? Not necessarily. One can certainly argue for an unrestricted market for building, buying, and selling houses while also arguing for a direct or indirect subsidy to low-income households to help them enter that market as renters or buyers. Indeed, these two policy approaches coexist in broad swaths of our state and nation, especially in small towns and rural areas where housing and zoning codes are either flexible or nonexistent.

The contradictions creep in when the questions get more specific. For example, here’s another policy the Elon pollsters represented to respondents: “change zoning laws to allow more houses per acre.” Because zoning is one of the main tools with which government restricts the housing market, you might expect public support for this option to be comparable to public support for a free-market approach.

And you’d be wrong. Only 40% of North Carolinians support a looser approach to zoning, with 60% in opposition to it.

Looking at the subgroups of respondents, I was struck by the extent to which Democrats were reasonably consistent about this. Among North Carolina Democrats, 57% said we should allow the free market to deal with housing costs and 54% said we should change zoning laws to allow more houses per acre. Among Republicans, 77% favored fewer government restrictions on the free market in general but only 31% favored lighter government restrictions on houses per acre. Unaffiliated North Carolinians were almost as conflicted about this issue as Republicans were.

As a longtime advocate of deregulating North Carolina’s housing market — which means, inevitably, allowing developers to offer a wide range of housing options to willing consumers — I found the Elon results disappointing but not surprising.

Over the years, I’ve found that many folks otherwise friendly to free enterprise and hostile to government encroachment see zoning codes in a different light. In their version of events, they enter a housing market already overlaid by lot-size minimums and other rules. They make their choices accordingly, in good faith, opting for neighborhoods with more or less density based on their own preferences.

Then some pesky politician or greedy developer (or reckless free-market ideologue) comes along and threatens to pull the regulatory rug out from under them. If some of the homes in the neighborhood get torn down and replaced by duplexes or triplexes, traffic will worsen. There’ll be more noise. The character of the neighborhood could change.

I can understand these concerns. Still, I find that I can’t reconcile them with a broader belief that free markets and individual choices represent a better way of solving problems than government dictates and central planning. Healthy, robust markets are always full of dynamism and churn. New technologies can radically increase the availability or decrease the cost of goods and services, but they often do so at a cost. It may take a while for workers skilled at shooing horses or growing hay to become skilled at riveting car panels or drilling oil. Or they may have to learn how to do something else, somewhere else.

In other words, markets are simply institutions for using prices to coordinate the varying and changing tastes of many different kinds of people. If a private developer brings new inventory to market that requires buyers voluntarily to restrict what structures can be placed on their property later on, so be it. But I don’t think governments should make such decisions. It’s a free-market thing — I hope you understand.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

If you were reading this column a year from today, just days before the 2022 midterm elections, I’d tell you that North Carolina Democrats were about to experience a catastrophe.

Their hopes of replacing Richard Burr with a Democrat would be dashed. Their Republican rivals would be about to regain supermajorities in the state legislature. Incumbent Democratic sheriffs, county commissioners, and other local officials would be about to lose their posts in normally blue-tinted places.

But it’s only 2021. A lot could change in a year. Unfortunately for Democrats in North Carolina, they aren’t really masters of their political fates. It’s almost all about Joe Biden, and right now it’s almost all bad news.

The John Locke Foundation’s latest Civitas Poll, taken in mid-October, put President Biden’s job approval at 39%. That’s down from 48% as recently as May. Another recent poll, conducted by High Point University, had Biden at 38% approval among all North Carolina adults and 41% among registered voters.

With ticket-splitting now a rare occurrence, an unpopular president invariably acts as a heavy weight on down-ballot candidates of the same party. In Locke’s October survey, “generic ballot” tests for congressional and legislative races found some of the largest GOP advantages I’ve ever seen: +6.2 points for Congress and +6.3 points for the General Assembly.

One survey can, of course, be an outlier. Prior polls have shown smaller Republican leads. Still, if you want to understand why some progressive activists and Democratic pols are sounding increasingly unhinged — and contemplating such extreme measures as forcing Republican Supreme Court justices off constitutional cases or putting a local Democratic judge in charge of state appropriations — put yourself in their shoes.

They’ve spent the past decade telling themselves that their 2010 loss of the legislature was a fluke, continued GOP governance was a dirty trick, and its policy changes were illegitimate. Now their dreams of a Democratic restoration are starting to fade. And while they wouldn’t want to admit it, I suspect more than a few realize the man they venerate for bringing the Trump administration to an end, Joe Biden, has proved to be a bad president himself, although in different ways.

The economy is his — and their — biggest problem. With prices surging and jobs going unfilled, voters are no longer willing to blame a former administration for their current woes (voters rarely are). Biden has given them plenty of reasons to blame him. Incessant talk of spending trillions of additional dollars, most of its borrowed, sounds like more fuel for the inflation fire.

Furthermore, when Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, injected themselves into raging local controversies about the decisions of school boards, they created yet another political mess for their party. Parents upset about COVID-era school closures and “woke” curriculum in public education may be mistaken. (Editorial clarification: they’re not.) But they are hardly “domestic terrorists” worthy of FBI investigation.

To the extent a few individuals have threatened violence against school boards or education officials, they deserve condemnation and investigation by local law enforcement. There was no evidence whatsoever of a national crisis meriting federal action, as most voters knew instinctively and the Biden administration should have known.

And while Afghanistan is no longer dominating the headlines like it was in late summer, the president’s humiliating retreat remains a big reason why so many voters have abandoned him. In the High Point University survey, only 25% of voters approved of Biden’s handling of Afghanistan, with 57% disapproving. It is his worst issue by far. The poll found 69% think the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States, and more North Carolinians say in retrospect we should have kept troops in Afghanistan than say we should have pulled them out.

Again, 12 months is a long time. Biden may recover somewhat. At the moment, however, what’s scaring North Carolina Democrats isn’t the latest horror flick in the movie theaters. It’s the horror show on TV newscasts.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolina lawmakers are reportedly considering some form of Medicaid expansion as part of a final budget deal with Gov. Roy Cooper that would also bring tax cuts and other free-market policy gains on key issues.

The prospect of such a deal disappoints me. But it doesn’t shock me. Washington Democrats intent on expanding government’s role in funding and regulating medical care have long had a clear strategy and the tactical acumen to pursue it. Their Republican counterparts have had neither.

When the Obama administration and its congressional allies enacted the Affordable Care Act more than a decade ago, Medicaid expansion was its centerpiece. Yes, the bill also created insurance exchanges. But in projected enrollments and spending, Medicaid expansion was the dominant element.

Even after the U.S. Supreme Court clarified that states couldn’t be compelled to expand Medicaid, progressives believed it would be very difficult for state leaders to resist the temptation. While Medicaid pays for services for needy patients, the actual recipients of the money are powerful institutions such as hospitals and drug companies. Progressives believed these interest groups would lobby hard for expansion every year until they got it.

Progressives were right. Most states, including many with Republican governments, subsequently expanded Medicaid. Now some North Carolina lawmakers want to follow suit.

I understand their motives. Among other things, the Biden administration is threatening to bypass recalcitrant legislatures by expanding Medicaid directly in North Carolina and other holdouts. If expansion is inevitable, the argument goes, why not try to retain some state control over it, and negotiate a deal that advances other conservative causes?

It didn’t have to be this way. Expanding access to medical care for those with low incomes or severe preexisting conditions could have been accomplished in other ways: by reducing barriers to entry for lower-cost providers such as nurse practitioners and walk-in clinics, for example, and by using tax credits or even better-designed insurance exchanges to subsidize coverage without forcing taxpayers to foot so much of the bill.

In 2017-18, Republicans had a chance to do these things while rolling back or at least changing the terms of Medicaid expansion. They controlled Congress and the White House. Unfortunately, neither President Trump nor Republican leaders made these tasks a priority. So here we are.

Expansion remains a bad idea for North Carolina, although some lawmakers are trying to convince themselves otherwise with three rationalizations. First, they claim expansion will be paid for with free federal dollars. In reality, the money will be neither “free” nor collected from some netherworld that is within the United States but not within the states of the union. Virtually all the taxes spent on Medicaid in North Carolina are collected from North Carolinians. The same will be true of Medicaid expansion.

Second, they claim Medicaid expansion will reduce pressure on the state’s emergency departments. No, it won’t. While telling the uninsured they now have “coverage” may lead some to consume services outside of hospitals, others become more likely to visit hospitals. Researchers have studied this question repeatedly since the enactment of the ACA. Most studies find either no net change or an increase in ED admissions after Medicaid expansion. A 2017 paper in the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine found that “total ED use per 1,000 population increased by 2.5 visits more in Medicaid expansion states than in non-expansion states.”

Third, rationalizers make the related claim that Medicaid expansion leads to better management of costly and debilitating diseases. There is conflicting evidence on this question, but at least when it comes to diabetes and asthma a new study posted by the National Bureau of Economic Research found no measurement improvement.

Conservatives should continue to resist expansions of our already gargantuan welfare state. And if they ever regain power in Washington, they should make it a priority this time to pursue practical reforms to reduce its deleterious effects on work, growth, and personal responsibility. That’s the only sustainable way out of this mess.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Are North Carolinians safer today than they were a decade ago? That depends on how you define the term “safe.”

The overall crime rate, defined as the total number of reported crimes divided by North Carolina’s population, was lower in 2020 than in 2010. But most of these reports concern property crimes: arson, burglary, larceny, and motor-vehicle theft. Their frequency certainly affects the security of our homes and possessions. Places with high rates of property crime also struggle to attract business investment and residential development.

It is, nevertheless, violence against people that most affects public perceptions. And in North Carolina, I’m sad to say, violent crimes are surging.

According to the latest FBI reports, there were 419 violent crimes per 100,000 North Carolinians last year. That’s 16% higher than the 2010 rate. Indeed, for the first time in more than a decade, North Carolina’s rate of violent crime is higher than the national average.

Two violent crimes are driving the trend: homicides and aggravated assaults. Though murder and manslaughter are comparatively rare, analysts often focus on these offenses because, unlike for others, there isn’t likely to be much of a difference between crimes reported and crimes committed. North Carolina’s homicide rate is up a stunning 45% just since 2018.

Did the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recession help to create the conditions that produced more homicides? Almost certainly. What about last year’s “defund the police” protests? Did they make officers less assertive in high-risk neighborhoods, emboldening violent criminals? Again, almost certainly. But some of the increase occurred in 2019, before these events took place. Crime is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes.

Still, I am persuaded that higher levels of policing tend to produce lower levels of crime. It makes sense. When more police officers are visibly on patrol in neighborhoods, individuals will think twice before committing crimes there.

You can’t prove (or disprove) such a relationship by comparing police staffing to crime rates and looking for simple correlations, however. If a community has low levels of criminality for other reasons, it might well have fewer officers on patrol. And a high-crime community might well hire lots of officers. Such relationships shouldn’t be used to assert that policing causes crime, although that hasn’t stopped some activists from saying so.

Better research designs show something very different. A recent study in the Journal of Public Economics exploited the fact that a 2009 bill vastly increased funding for a federal grant program for local cops. The new grants varied greatly across communities based on an application score, not on crime rates. These conditions created something like an experiment. Communities receiving grants saw policing levels rise by an average of 3.2%. They also experienced a 3.5% reduction in crime.

Another recent study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, focused on beat cops in Dallas, Texas. For years, the department used GPS to track the precise locations of all their police cars. When officers responded to emergency calls outside their immediate beats, the system recorded that absence. Comparing the pattern against crime reports, the researcher found that a 10% reduction in police presence in a neighborhood was associated with a 7% increase in crime.

To say that policing can deter crime is not to say that all forms of policing work equally well. For example, should we continue to deploy law enforcement in schools as resource officers? Some argue that the practice inherently escalates low-level disputes best handled by teachers, counselors, and principals. Others say it makes schools safer. I found persuasive a recent study of resource officers in North Carolina. Published in Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, it concluded both that the practice both reduces school violence and results in more referrals of youngsters, disproportionately minorities, into the justice system.

There are tradeoffs and unanswered questions that merit further study. But on the whole, our communities need more policing, not less. That’s what North Carolina’s recent surge in violence tells me.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

A few weeks ago, the Associated Press and a nonprofit journalism outfit called The Markup released a dataset and news stories purporting to prove the existence of pervasive discrimination against racial minorities by mortgage lenders. The McClatchy newspapers in North Carolina (The Charlotte Observer, The News & Observer in Raleigh, and the Herald-Sun in Durham) splashed the Markup/AP findings across their front pages and contributed additional reporting about the North Carolina-specific data.

I grimaced when I saw the headlines. I groaned as I read the stories.

These kinds of allegations are old hat. Long ago, they likely had some validity, back when bankers and other lenders were foolish enough to let personal bigotry interfere with their responsibility to maximize return on investment assets.

Prejudice is morally wrong. In business, it is also immensely foolish. If you refuse to hire the best people because of their sex, sexuality, or skin color, your smarter competitors will gain at your expense. In the case of mortgage lending, the past practice of redlining harmed not only the targeted minorities but also the institutions that refused to offer them loans. The latter were leaving money on the table — interest payments on principal they’d refused to lend to qualified borrowers unlikely to default.

Market pressures tend to subvert discriminatory behavior. I’m not alleging that free enterprise yields perfect outcomes, regarding this or any other matter. Some economic actors really do prefer to lose income in order to indulge their prejudices. But beware of those who claim the only tools against discrimination are legislation and litigation. Competition is a very useful one.

To return to the question of mortgage lending, attempts to prove the existence of discrimination by examining loan-approval rates, as the Markup/AP team tried to do, are wrongheaded. External analysts lack the complete set of information about loan applicants, including credit scores, that financial institutions use to guide their decisions.

A more-revealing approach is to examine not the “front end” of the process, as it were, but the “back end.” How often do borrowers default on their mortgages? If lenders make their decisions without prejudice, then the default rates for, say, white and Hispanic customers ought to be roughly the same. That is, default rates would show lenders are equally willing to take a risk with a white applicant as with an otherwise-comparable Hispanic applicant.

If, on the other hand, a lender takes ethnicity into account and assumes whites are more trustworthy — more likely to pay their loans back — than Hispanics are, then the lender will award more loans to white applicants than to Hispanic applicants with the same incomes, debts, credit scores, and financial history. That means, in turn, that the prejudiced lender will experience a lower average default rate for Hispanic customers than for white customers.

The statistical analysis involved is a bit more complicated than any short explanation can convey, I admit, and over time economists have persuasively argued that default-rate data need themselves to be risk-adjusted. Still, if someone purports to assess the extent of discrimination in lending without paying close attention to default rates, that someone is either poorly informed or is actively trying to misinform.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Markup/AP analysis, parroted by some newspapers, didn’t pay close attention to default rates. Edward Pinto and Tobias Peter, both fellows with the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, have now performed precisely the analysis that should have been performed all along. They found that risk-adjusted default rates on mortgage loans are either the same or higher for black and Hispanic borrowers than for white borrowers.

There is, in other words, no evidence here of systematic discrimination against racial minorities by mortgage lenders. The AEI Housing Center’s study is only the latest of several producing a similar conclusion. Most who allege pervasive discrimination are very much aware of this flaw in their argument. That they continue to peddle it reflects poorly on them — and on those who assist them.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Closing down school buildings for many months last year — and offering poorly planned and executed virtual schooling as an inadequate substitute — proved to be a disaster for North Carolina children, families, and the education system itself.

We can say this now with great confidence. When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck North Carolina in March 2020, no such confidence was possible. Although I disagreed with the decision at the time, I understood why officials closed public schools for the final three months of the 2019-20 academic year.

Failing to reopen them fully for 2020-21 was, however, indefensible. By then the risk profile of the pandemic was better known. Older North Carolinians, particularly those over 65 or with preexisting co-morbidities such as obesity, were at significant risk of hospitalization or death. Children weren’t, and still aren’t.

How much damage did school closures do? Let us count the ways.

Nearly a third of North Carolina third-graders failed the grade. Their reading scores, even after intensive reading camps and retests this summer, were too low to permit them to advance normally to the next grade. Some are now repeating third grade. Others were placed in special classes in an attempt to accelerate them into fourth-grade proficiency by next spring.

The academic wreckage extends far beyond third grade, which just happens to be a focal grade for our accountability system. Just 39% of first-graders scored at grade level in reading. For the K-12 population as a whole, only 45% of our public-school students passed their state exams this year.

We can all hope that, through strategic investments and heroic efforts, many of these young North Carolinians will recoup the learning they lost during the shutdowns. But we shouldn’t have to hope for the best. We should have been spared the worst. Schoolchildren were neither significantly at risk from COVID nor a significant vector of transmission for COVID. By the fall of last year, policymakers should have known that.

The downsides weren’t limited to learning loss. Even for those students who did okay (or in a few cases better than okay) in virtual learning last year, their absence from school imposed massive burdens on North Carolina families. Some parents were compelled to cut back on their work hours or leave their jobs altogether, reducing household incomes and adding more stress to their already stressful experience with the pandemic. Alas, the pot sometimes boiled over, leading to tragic cases of neglect, substance abuse, or domestic violence.

And for public education itself, school closures have produced a crisis of public confidence. While some officials and educators voiced their support for struggling families and called for a rapid return to in-person schooling, many others didn’t. Some were condescending and obnoxious in their dismissal of parental complaints and insisted nonsensically on working from home until the “end” of the pandemic.

Not surprisingly, the share of North Carolina children enrolled in public schools dropped precipitously last year. Moreover, the share of North Carolina parents posing tough questions to education officials and school boards skyrocketed.

Parents aren’t just upset about last year’s school closures, or about mask mandates they deem unnecessary. Many of these parents are upset by what they learned from direct observation of the lessons, textbooks, and assignments their children received while “learning” from home. If anyone think these parents will be silenced by bureaucratic bluster — or attempts to concoct a national specter of “domestic terrorism” from a few outrageous incidences of threats to school officials — they are misreading the room.

Again, I don’t really blame North Carolina leaders for mistakes they may have made during the initial few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. My own views evolved during the spring and summer of 2020 as I consumed more information and listened to more briefings. But by the start of the 2020-21 school year, it was time to pivot to a different approach for schools. It didn’t happen. We’ll all be paying the price for many years to come.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently in conversation with right-leaning leaders, policy experts, donors, and activists. My purpose is to assess the health and trajectory of American conservatism at this critical moment.

A common refrain from disgruntled conservatives is that for all the talk of reducing the size and scope of government, their movement has made little progress. Federal deficits are massive. There’s been no substantial reforms of the entitlements that now account for most of the federal budget — of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and past administrations of both parties have mostly added rather than subtracted to the government’s powers and expenses.

I share their disdain for the utter lack of fiscal responsibility in Washington. It’s a bipartisan problem. But the federal government isn’t the whole story. Here in North Carolina, conservative governance has actually reduced the size of state government and significantly improved its fiscal condition.

Left-leaning politicians and organizations agree with my observation here — although they don’t, of course, consider it to be good news. According to the latest calculation by the North Carolina Justice Center, the budget deal that leaders of the state house and senate have struck will set General Fund spending for the 2021-22 fiscal year at just over 4.5% of North Carolina’s gross domestic product.

As a share of the economy, state spending has averaged about 5.8% over the past 45 years. It was well over 6% as recently as 2009. Since fiscally conservative Republicans won control of the General Assembly in 2010, however, budgets have gone up every year in dollar terms but have gone down almost every year when expressed as a share of GDP.

That’s because legislative leaders have stuck to their commitment to keep annual spending growth at or below the combined rates of inflation and population growth. Since GDP usually grows faster than that, the result has been to shrink the size and scope of state government. That has, in turn, allowed legislators to rebuild the state’s savings reserves, pay off state debt, and finance several rounds of growth-enhancing tax cuts.

There’s no “voodoo economics” here. Our tax cuts have likely boosted economic growth, to be sure, but not fast enough to produce a net revenue gain. The reason the state budget remains in surplus is that lawmakers have maintained spending discipline. There is every reason to believe they’ll continue to do so.

When the General Assembly changed hands in 2010, the state had accumulated state debts totaling about $8,000 per North Carolinian, according to a watchdog organization called Truth in Accounting. Some of that debt was on-the-books debt, the result of past bond issuances or of borrowing from Washington to fund unemployment-insurance benefits. And some of that debt represented an unfunded liability for state benefits owed to public employees upon retirement.

By 2020, North Carolina’s debt burden had tumbled to $1,400 per person — a dramatic improvement. While we still need to shore up the health plan for state employees and retirees, our state now ranks 14th on Truth in Accounting’s fiscal health index. If present trends continue, we’ll soon reach the top 10.

Are conservatives in state government more principled and committed than their counterparts in Congress and the executive branch? Quite possibly, but I don’t think that’s the main reason Raleigh (and some other state capitals) have gotten it right and Washington has gotten it so very wrong.

The divergence reflects the critical importance of rules and institutions. In North Carolina and nearly all other states, legislators and governors are required by their constitutions to enacted balanced budgets. While borrowing for capital needs is permissible and sometimes prudent, states generally aren’t allowed to finance operating expenses with debt. The federal government, of course, has no such rule.

It ought to. In all future elections for Congress or the White House, I plan to vote only for candidates who pledge to support a balanced-budget amendment to the United States Constitution. Will you join me?

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The latest news about North Carolina transportation was no surprise. In a pattern all too familiar, our leaders have planned for and promised more highway projects than can be financed with current revenue sources.

The latest estimate of the gap was, however, staggering. For projects already committed — that is, scheduled to be initiated early in the state’s 2024-2033 plan — the gap between projected revenues and expected highway expenses is about $7 billion, according to the latest update from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. And if the list is expanded to include all the originally anticipated projects, the funding gap rises to $13 billion.

I’ve written many times about the defects of our current system for funding highways, which relies too much on per-gallon taxes in a world of improving gas mileage and a growing fleet of electric vehicles. As a recent John Locke Foundation report explains, North Carolina needs to figure out the most economical way of moving towards charging motorists by actual usage, not gas consumed. That means adopting some combination of tolling new highway capacity and replacing the gas tax with a mileage-based user fee.

You don’t like those options? Believe me, I understand. But the alternatives for financing our roads are worse: higher gas taxes, bigger federal deficits, and cross-subsidies from general taxes that sever the link between usage and revenue. I’d rather charge people based on how often they drive the road network rather than distort the market through higher income, sales, or motor-fuels taxes.

But while state leaders understandably reacted to the latest DOT report by debating new revenue options, there is no practical way forward that will close a $13-billion funding gap. To be blunt, some of highway projects on the drawing board are not going to be completed by 2033.

There is no political will to raise any tax or fee by the amount required to fund all the projects. And because of DOT’s past mistakes and miscommunications, neither lawmakers nor average voters have sufficient confidence in it to implement the plan as envisioned.

Even in our increasingly connected world, highways remain the primary arteries of commuting and commerce. At earlier stages in the expansion of automobility in the United States, spanning much of the 20th century, the cost of building and maintaining the road network was recouped many times over in economic and social benefits.

Plenty of new projects are still likely to be cost-effective, too, but there is no question that investing in highways, like investing in anything else, is subject to diminishing returns. There will be alternative uses of those dollars — such as improving the electrical grid and expanding access to broadband — that may well buy more benefit for the buck.

Again, I’m not one who denies the need for a new revenue mix. If the state takes no action, North Carolina’s transportation revenues will decline over time on an inflation-adjusted, per-mile basis. That’s not some politician’s exaggeration. That’s just basic math. Some productivity gains may be possible to make up the difference, but not nearly enough. And we should stop diverting revenues to mass transit and intercity rail projects that move far too few people at far too high a cost. Even if we zeroed those line items out and poured all the money into roads, however, it won’t come close to meeting the need.

Yes, if North Carolinians want more and better roadways to accommodate the needs of our growing population and economy, we’ll have to be prepared to pay a sufficient price for it. Still, I doubt very seriously that most of us will be willing to pay high-enough taxes or fees to close a $13-billion funding gap.

So policymakers need to tackle it at both ends. They should adopt the mix of user fees and tolls that the Locke report suggests. They should also assemble a long list of projects that DOT will agree to defer past 2033. Realism is required here.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

In the England of the early 20th century, there were no two writers more dissimilar than G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Chesterton was a conservative who wrote literary essays, a long-running newspaper column, and the popular Father Brown series of detective stories. Shaw was a socialist whose famous plays include Man and Superman, Saint Joan, and Pygmalion, from which the popular musical My Fair Lady was later adapted.

Chesterton and Shaw had few views in common. But they were friends and occasional collaborators. Once they staged a mock trial about the murder of the Charles Dickens character Edwin Drood. Chesterton even claimed that, on a lark, the two played cowboys together in a never-released silent movie.

Their banter was the stuff of legend. It is said Chesterton, 6 foot 4 and weighing nearly 300 pounds, once turned to the skinny Shaw and quipped that “to look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England.” Without missing a beat, Shaw replied: “To look at you, anyone would think you had caused it.”

I call your attention to Chesterton and Shaw not simply to encourage you to read their works (though you should) but to underline that even a century ago, good friendships between prominent conservatives and progressives were so uncommon that they drew public attention. Some of Chesterton’s friends surely thought Shaw’s embrace of agnosticism, socialism, and eugenics made him a poor prospect for friendship. No doubt some of Shaw’s allies thought the same of Chesterton.

Fortunately for them, and for us, the two writers shrugged off such criticism. To engage someone respectfully or even affectionately does not require that you agree on political issues. “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies,” Chesterton once wrote, “probably because they are generally the same people.”

In our own work with the North Carolina Leadership Forum, based at Duke University, my colleagues and I seek to apply such practical wisdom to the political discourse in our own state. We bring together some three dozen leaders at a time from across North Carolina. They differ by profession, background, region, and politics. They include politicians, government officials, business and nonprofit executives, and other civic leaders.

Each year we choose a topic about which there is rich disagreement. In the past we’ve discussed poverty and economic mobility, energy policy, school choice, immigration, and policy responses to COVID-19. For the 2021-22 cohort, we’ll be talking about access to quality health care in North Carolina.

Our goal isn’t consensus. We know going in that our conservative and progressive participants disagree profoundly about key questions of health policy, and that they aren’t likely to leave at the end of the program with a comprehensive plan of action.

While some interesting and productive agreements do occur in our program, we focus mostly on issues where there remains substantial disagreement. What we seek to model and promote is constructive engagement across political difference. If your views are different from mine, you need not think me ignorant, stupid, or evil. In fact, if you leap to that conclusion, it hurts you more than it hurts me. You miss an opportunity to learn, even to sharpen your case for your position.

Our model works. A survey of last year’s participants found that 94% said they better understood the values, opinions, or priorities of those with different perspectives, and 65% said they are now making efforts to encourage or facilitate conversations between people of different parties or ideologies in their communities.

“Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel,” Chesterton wrote, “is that it interrupts an argument.” The North Carolina Leadership Forum isn’t trying to wish political differences away. They’re essentially “baked in the cake” of human experience. They reflect fundamental differences in perspective and priorities. What we want is for our leaders to stop bickering so much. Only then can we have rich and productive arguments about the future of our state and nation.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When President Joe Biden’s approval numbers began to plummet in early August, driven by public disgust with the disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, hopeful Democrats suggested that as the news cycle moved on, Biden would recover.

It was a plausible theory. So far, however, there’s been no such recovery. As of late September, the RealClearPolitics average of job-approval polls has Biden at 45%, down from 53% as recently as late July.

Here in North Carolina, a swing state with a Republican lean, the president and his party remain in big trouble. A new survey conducted by High Point University’s polling unit has Biden’s support among registered voters at 41%. The John Locke Foundation’s latest Civitas Poll, taken in mid-August, had Biden at 42%.

We are, of course, a long way from the next election. Other presidential administrations have gotten off to rocky starts only to regain their footing later on. At this moment, then, more than a year before the 2022 midterms, it would be unwise to offer a firm prediction about outcomes. But it’s not too early to ponder these three big questions:

First, what best explains Biden’s tumble? There are many potential explanations. For example, the delta variant has spurred a new wave of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Fairly or not, the Biden administration is taking much of the blame, even as some of its preferred policies, such as vaccine mandates, enjoy majority support. (I oppose the Biden’s employer mandate on prudential, legal, and constitutional grounds, but I admit that many fearful Americans support it).

While public confidence in Biden’s handling of the pandemic has fallen, it remains one of the president’s strongest issues — by which I mean that the public is closely divided on it rather than clearly disaffected. In the High Point University survey, for example, 46% of registered voters approve of Biden’s performance on COVID-19 and 46% disapprove.

On other issues, there’s no such close call. Only 37% approve of Biden’s performance on the economy, with 52% opposing it. He’s also upside-down when it comes to shouldering the responsibility of the commander in chief (36% approval to 51% disapproval) and managing the Afghanistan crisis (26% to 59%).

Now for a second question more specific to our state: if Biden remains unpopular a year from now, can North Carolina Democrats avert electoral calamity by avoiding the party’s national brand and clinging more tightly to Gov. Roy Cooper? This has long been a tried-and-true strategy for Democrats in states such as North Carolina. Former Gov. Mike Easley, for example, cruised to reelection in 2004 even as former President George W. Bush won the state by more than 12 percentage points. Down the ballot, Democrats didn’t suffer the devastating losses one might have expected that year. Easley served as their “firewall,” as more than one Democrat told me after the 2004 elections.

In this respect, at least, Roy Cooper is no Mike Easley. Although he won reelection last year with 51.5% of the vote, Cooper’s support has dropped since then. In the High Point poll, he’s at 48% approval to 33% disapproval. In the Civitas poll, which screens for likely voters, he’s at 44.6% approval to 44.6% disapproval. In other words, the bottom certainly hasn’t fallen out for Cooper. But he’s not popular enough to wall off the state’s Democratic candidates from the Biden brand.

Here’s the final question: if the political climate doesn’t improve for Biden and the Democrats over the next year, is the GOP fated to achieve smashing victories? Not necessarily. Politics is about comparisons, not just plebiscites. North Carolina Republicans must recruit credible candidates. They must offer substantive ideas for building on past accomplishments and solving problems. And they must eschew conspiracy theories that may discourage their own voters from turning out, as happened in last year’s special Senate elections in Georgia.

Biden’s decline gives Republicans an opening. That’s doesn’t mean they can just stumble through it and expect a big gain.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

MOUNT AIRY — Before The Andy Griffith Show, before nearby Pilot Mountain became the nucleus of a popular state park, Mount Airy had the Rock.

Granite, to be precise. Mount Airy is home to the largest open-face granite quarry in the world. Stretching over 60 acres on the surface and thousands of feet below is a mass of stone so pure and desirable that it can be found in such varied sites as the World War II Memorial in Washington, the gold depository at Fort Knox, the Wright Brothers National Memorial, and street curbing in frigid climes where the brine used to clear snow and ice can destroy any concrete.

Mining began here in 1889. But Mount Airy was already a thriving town — and had even achieved some notoriety in the mid-19th century as the home of the original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker. Its broader fame began in 1960 when local boy Andy Griffith, already a star of stage and screen, launched his eponymous sitcom on CBS.

Mount Airy is a real place. Mayberry is fictional. But in the minds of its many millions of fans, Mayberry is a real place, too — not a physical location but a moral one. A place where mistakes earn people second chances, not everlasting scorn. A place where parents teach their children the virtues of honesty, responsibility, and compassion — and sometimes get schooled themselves in those same virtues by those same children.

Desperate to find such a place, if even just for a weekend, fans began visiting Mount Airy in droves. The Granite City proved supple enough to welcome them. You can get into a vintage squad car at Wally’s Filling Station and be carried to Floyd’s Barber Shop for a trim, Barney’s Cafe for a smile, and the Snappy Lunch for its famous pork-chop sandwich.

I was in Mount Airy recently for the Mayberry Days festival. My new Revolutionary War-themed novel Mountain Folk is partly set on the distinctive High Pinnacle of nearby Pilot Mountain, so it was a natural for me to do a downtown book signing. But that was just an excuse. My wife and I wanted a weekend getaway. We got that, and much more, thanks to Ted Koppel.

No, the famous newsman wasn’t in Mount Airy when we were there. But he’d come a short time before, producing a segment that aired on CBS Sunday Morning just as Mayberry Days was about to begin.

It was, alas, largely a hit piece. Looking more discombobulated than discerning, Koppel sought to depict Andy Griffith fans as bigoted fools wallowing in nostalgia about a racially segregated past. He reacted with mock dismay at the idea that a couple from Ohio would let their son watch the show for hours at a time. “Aren’t you afraid,” he asked disdainfully, that “you’re going to turn his little brain to mush?”

There was also a lengthy interview with some tourists who believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump, think the January 6 riot was staged by antifa, and see journalists as “enemies of the people.” Of course, there are quite a few Trump supporters who believe such rubbish. They’ve been lied to, yes. But they’ve also alienated by years of watching sneering schoolmarms like Koppel.

The folks I talked to in Mount Airy were enraged by his hit piece. Few television shows on the air half a century ago were racially integrated. Why did CBS choose this much-beloved program, and the proud community that celebrates it, as battlefields in someone else’s culture war? If you think The Andy Griffith Show continues to brighten the days of its many fans because of some misbegotten yearning for white supremacy, you are deeply confused — and entirely untrustworthy as an observer of the human condition.

People long for Mayberry because of the timeless and universal truths found there. Like folks have done for more than a century, they come to Mount Airy looking for solid rock.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolina’s economy has enjoyed a substantial recovery from the depths of the Great Suppression — that is, from the COVID-19 downturn of 2020. Most businesses are back up and operating. So are schools and universities. More employees than ever before are working from home. That’s had positive consequences for worker satisfaction and traffic congestion (although the consequences for productivity are admittedly unclear). State government is flush with revenue. North Carolina’s headline unemployment rate was just 4.3% in August.

Lurking beneath these positive trends are some trouble signs, however. Perhaps the most obvious is what the headline unemployment rate, called the U-3 rate, doesn’t measure.

The U-3 rate is a fraction for which the numerator is the number of people who tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics they are unemployed and actively looking for a job. The denominator is the number of people working plus the number of people who are jobless but actively looking.

Notice that if you aren’t working and you aren’t actively looking for a job — because you’ve given up in frustration, at least temporarily, or you’re in the middle of a life change such as relocation or taking care of an elderly relative — you aren’t counted as “unemployed” in the headline rate. Furthermore, if you’re working part-time but would rather be working full-time, you aren’t employed to your full potential or preference. You’re underemployed. For the purposes of U-3, however, you are simply counted as “employed.”

All states have sizable shares of disaffected, transitional, and involuntarily part-time workers. While the U-3 rate doesn’t measure those shares, the federal government captures that information in other ways. North Carolinians would be well-advised to look beyond the headline unemployment rate that draws the most media attention each month, and supplement their understanding of North Carolina’s labor market by looking at other measures.

For example, the government computes a statistic called labor-force participation. What share of potential workers are either employed or actively looking? In August, that rate for North Carolina was 59.2%. Unfortunately, our labor-force participation is down from 60.1% at the beginning of 2021. That’s larger than the drop so far this year in Virginia (.3%). In Tennessee, there’s been no net change. In Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, participation in the labor force has gone up during 2021, not down. This is a case where North Carolina sticks out like a very sore thumb.

Here’s another trouble sign. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes broader unemployment measures, consisting of 12-month rolling averages updated every quarter. These broader measures include the unemployed and underemployed workers the U-3 rate leaves out. As of June, that broadest measure for North Carolina, the U-6 rate, was 10.3%. That’s higher than the U-6 rates in most Southeastern states (although Florida, at 12%, has the highest U-6 rate of all, reflecting its particular vulnerability to sectoral downturns in tourism and recreation).

As you’ve been reading this column so far, your mind may well have jumped ahead to consider policy implications. I don’t blame you — I’m especially prone to this temptation, given how long I spent as the leader of a public policy think tank, the John Locke Foundation.

To observe that these labor-market signals are troubling is, however, not necessarily to establish partisan blame or advance someone’s talking points. Democratic activists think Republicans should have started spending the state’s revenue surplus more quickly, and massively. Republican activists think Gov. Roy Cooper’s COVID-19 restrictions were overly restrictive and continue to have lingering effects. The two sides disagree about the role of expanded unemployment-insurance payments in keeping workers on the sidelines of the labor market, and on many other potential explanations.

I have my own views about these matters, but the first step to staging an effective debate about remedies is to agree on the basic scope of the problem. Our headline unemployment doesn’t portray it adequately, given that some of its recent decline is the result of workers giving up, not workers finding jobs.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The income of the median American household fell by nearly 3% last year as the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent regulations shuttered many businesses for months, closed others for good, and forced still other employers to cut back on hours and wages for the people they still employed.

Or so the official federal income statistic tells us. It includes wages and salaries, of course, as well as investment gains and unemployment insurance benefits. However, it doesn’t include tax refunds, stimulus checks, or noncash assistance in the form of food or housing. If those forms of income were included, median household income in the United States went up in 2020, by 4%.

Similarly, the standard poverty measure from the U.S. Census Bureau hit 11.4% last year. That’s up a percentage point from 2019, representing about 3.3 million more poor Americans. But, again, the standard poverty measure leaves a lot of income out of its calculation. According to the bureau’s supplemental poverty measure, 9.1% of Americans were poor in 2020, a big drop from the 11.7% rate it reported in 2019.

Are these just examples of statistical fun and games? Hardly. How policymakers, opinion leaders, and the general public respond to economic issues cannot be attributed solely or even mostly to their own experiences. Decades of polls suggest that Americans tend to rate their own economic present and future much more positively than they rate the overall economy’s present and future. The latter is based more on what they see, read, or hear from news reports rather than their own personal experience, which is inherently limited.

It has never made sense to measure and track trends in personal incomes and poverty based on such narrowly circumscribed and unrepresentative “official” statistics. To say that a family would be poor if not for off-the-books income or government assistance, for example, is to convey useful information, to be sure. But it doesn’t tell us whether that family is actually living below the poverty line in terms of total cash, goods, and services received.

Indeed, even the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure still leaves out too much. As economists Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of Notre Dame have demonstrated convincingly in a series of published papers, the true poverty rate has averaged well below 5% in recent years.

Having written about this issue for a long time, I can say from personal experience that highly partisan analysts dislike hearing about it. Progressives say such alternative measures are nothing more than an attempt to wish away problems of poverty and income inequality. Conservatives say to include government benefits in income and poverty measures is to give too much credit to welfare policies that, they insist, have had little effect since the onset of the War on Poverty in the 1960s.

These faulty responses serve as an excellent illustration of why accurate statistics about economic conditions are so important. They aren’t just numbers. They are tools for depicting real facts on the ground. To measure the poverty rate without including all cash and noncash benefits the poor receive from the government is to misrepresent reality. Doubling or tripling welfare spending would, by this measure, have no effect on poverty. What a silly notion.

As for my fellow conservatives, we are better off distinguishing between measurements of living standards and measurements of self-sufficiency. The War on Poverty wasn’t simply a promise to redistribute income indefinitely, in order to alleviate immediate suffering. Its promise was that early interventions by government, ranging from preschool and child care to job training and housing assistance, would help more American families become self-sufficient over time.

Many programs did provide immediate relief, and continue to do so. You can measure their effects with accurate statistics, which show a dramatic decline in poverty since the 1960s. But for the most part, they didn’t produce self-sufficiency.

Poverty remains a big problem afflicting millions of people. Measuring it incorrectly doesn’t move us towards long-term solutions.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I got the COVID-19 vaccine shortly after it became publicly available. I did so because I was persuaded that the benefits of vaccination far outweighed the risk.

Over the subsequent months, the case for vaccination has only gotten stronger. While the delta variant is easier to spread than prior strains, the best-available evidence is that about one in 5,000 vaccinated people are testing positive for the virus. Unvaccinated Americans are nearly five times more likely to get infected. More importantly, the death rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people are wildly disproportionate. The latter are 10 times as likely to be hospitalized and 11 times as likely to die from COVID-19.

In other words, for the vast majority of people eligible for vaccination, saying yes is the right answer. It’s the right answer for your own health and for your families’ well-being. It’s also the right answer to alleviate stress on hospitals and medical personnel. There are some exceptions. But don’t ask the Internet if you’re one of them. Ask your doctor.

Although an advocate of vaccination, I strongly oppose President Joe Biden’s attempt to force private companies to make vaccination or weekly testing a condition of employment. His order violates fundamental principles of federalism and the separation of powers. It is also a violation of the statutes governing federal rulemaking. And it employs a self-defeating argument that vaccines aren’t really all that helpful in protecting us from serious or deadly cases.

Let’s start with the constitutional case. The federal government is one of enumerated powers. By contrast, state governments possess a generalized “police power” that permits (but does not require) the use of coercion to accomplish certain public ends. It is a long-established principle that states or the localities they create can require vaccinations in certain situations, such as children enrolling in schools (including private ones). The federal government lacks such power. Even President Biden said in the past that a federal vaccine mandate would be neither necessary nor proper.

To justify his sudden change of heart, Biden is arguing that the federal statutes establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are broad enough to allow an order that companies with more than 100 employees must fire workers who neither get vaccinated nor agree to weekly testing. More specifically, the president is calling for OSHA to issue an emergency temporary standard, thus bypassing the standard process of hearings and external comments that accompany federal rulemaking.

Cato Institute scholar Walter Olson pointed out after Biden’s announcement that several such standards have been struck down by federal courts as overly broad claims of unilateral executive authority. “If the administration prevails on this issue,” wrote George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, “it would set a dangerous precedent, and undermine the constitutional separation of powers.”

It also relies on the idea that unvaccinated workers pose a grave risk to their vaccinated coworkers. This is an unwise and counterproductive claim. Holdouts are already highly skeptical of what politicians say about the vaccines — and for good reason. During the 2020 presidential campaign, both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden expressed doubts about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, in an obvious and cynical sop to a Democratic base susceptible to anti-Trump conspiracy theories.

Now, as president and vice president, they say the vaccines are safe and effective. They’re right. But why should skeptics believe them, if Biden is also saying that being vaccinated isn’t a substantial defense against being hospitalized or killed by the virus? The reason people should get vaccinated is that it will reduce their chances of a COVID infection and dramatically reduce their chances of suffering or dying from a serious bout of the disease. Period.

“The risks of getting any version of the virus remain small for the vaccinated,” the New York Times reported last week, “and the risks of getting badly sick remain minuscule.” I believe this is true. In arguing for his mandate, Biden contradicted that truth.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Do the ends justify the means? This familiar question produces strong feelings precisely because its answer is necessarily complicated. Just about all of us admit to a scenario, such as the proverbial ticking time-bomb, in which we would countenance unsavory means if required to save lives. In general, however, most religious and ethical traditions teach that we are not permitted to use injurious or unethical means to accomplish even noble ends.

Constitutional republics, in particular, are based on precisely the opposite formulation: the means justify the ends. Whatever our personal interest in a given governmental outcome may be, citizens of a republic are required to accept unwelcome ends as long as the means by which they were achieved are proper. A guilty person may go free if a police officer or prosecutor acts illegally or unethically. The other side may win a legislative argument. The other party may win an election.

In recent years, Democrats have complained loudly that Republicans have breached the social contract regarding means and ends. Although I am politically conservative, I have agreed with some of those Democratic complaints, regarding such matters as legislative encroachment on executive power and the irresponsible rhetoric that preceded January 6.

My hate mail switches from Republican to Democratic, however, when I point out that our political history extends far past 2010. That many of the same Democrats who criticize Republican gerrymandering, for example, were once enthusiastic practitioners of Democratic gerrymandering, including Gov. Roy Cooper. That before there were Republican Birthers questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship there were Democratic Truthers who thought the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.

Of course, two wrongs don’t make a right. “He started it!” is no more an excuse for political heavy-handedness than it is an excuse for one of your children to attack the other in a backseat rumble while you’re trying to keep your eyes on the road.

At the moment, it happens to be the Democrats throwing the punches. In Washington, Joe Biden has exceeded any reasonable definition of presidential power by ordering vaccine mandates on private businesses. In Raleigh, a local judge is threatening to fine Republican legislators unless they enact an education program concocted by progressive policy wonks and Democratic politicians.

Here’s another example, involving two amendments North Carolinians added to their state constitution in 2018. One requires that a voter show a photo ID before casting a ballot. The other sets North Carolina’s maximum tax rate on personal income at 7%. Both were popular ballot measures, gaining 55% and 57% of the vote, respectively, in the 2018 election. But progressives dislike them. So they filed a lawsuit claiming that the referenda were illegally held because the legislature that placed the measures of the ballot was illegally constituted by gerrymandered districts.

I’ve advocated redistricting reform for decades. For most of that time, the gerrymanderers were Democrats. I never thought to argue that the state budgets they enacted, the laws they passed, or the constitutional amendments they placed on the ballot were illegal acts of an illegal legislature.

That’s because the argument is ridiculous and dangerous, especially when applied to constitutional amendments. What more democratic process is there than allowing voters to decide an issue by referendum?

It gets still worse. Now that the matter is before the North Carolina Supreme Court, the plaintiffs are attempting to force two Republican members from the case. They argue that Justice Phil Berger Jr. can’t participate because his father is president pro tem of the Senate, and that Justice Tamara Barringer can’t participate because she served in the Senate when the amendments were submitted to the voters in 2018.

Berger and Barringer were themselves elected by voters in 2020 to preside over constitutional questions on the Court. Are Democratic activists, cheered on by Democratic leaders, truly willing to undermine popular sovereignty in this way? Yes, it seems. Can they not foresee how Republicans will respond?

“He started it” is no way to end it.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When North Carolinians are free to trade with whomever they choose, be it South Carolinians or South Koreans, some local businesses may lose sales. The case for markets isn’t based on promises of cost-free benefits or perfect outcomes. No such promises could ever be honored in the real world.

Yes, the broader the market for goods or services, the most likely it becomes that some local producers won’t be able to compete with faraway ones. The true case for free trade is that these adverse consequences for individuals or companies represent just one side of the equation. The other side, the benefits, comprise not only the local consumers who get more or better goods at lower prices but also the local residents who earn higher real incomes as a result.

Who are they? The most-obvious example would be our friends and neighbors who work for firms based overseas but with a substantial presence in our state. By being connected to the global economy, we don’t just lose jobs to other places. We also gain jobs from other places.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 319,000 North Carolinians are employed by multinational firms with a direct foreign investment here. If we didn’t welcome such investment — which requires, in part, be open to direct American investment in foreign countries, too — many of these North Carolinians would be employed by domestic firms, but necessarily at the same wages. And some of those workers wouldn’t be in North Carolina at all.

Now let’s talk exports. From agriculture and life sciences to manufacturing and finance, North Carolina-based companies make a lot of money selling goods and services overseas. That money translates into more jobs, higher wages, and greater investment returns for us. When we slap tariffs and other trade restrictions on imports, other countries do the same to our exports.

Speaking of imports, another way that free trade produces net benefits for North Carolinians is by making raw materials, equipment, and supplies more affordable for domestic firms. If the federal government jacks up tariffs on steel or aluminum imports, for instance, that increases the production cost for companies that make vehicles, aircraft, and industrial machinery. Not all of that extra cost can be passed along to the end-user. Some of it gets eaten by the producers, in the form of fewer jobs and lower wages.

And what if our producers could pass along all this extra cost to consumers? That would represent still another adverse consequence from trade restrictions. If trade restrictions force me to pay more for a truck, electronic device, or new air conditioner, that means I have less money to spend on other goods and services that may be produced entirely within North Carolina.

The benefits of free trade, in other words, aren’t confined to a small sliver of our population. They flavor a big slice of the economic pie. Estimates vary, but a recent study for the Business Roundtable is probably not too far off the mark. Using 2018 data, it estimates that about 41 million American jobs, about a fifth of the total, are tied to international trade. For North Carolina, the model suggests a net gain of 1.2 million jobs from trade.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that if Washington enacts more protectionist policies, all those jobs will be lost. Few politicians say they are against international trade in general. They focus on sectors they consider to be “strategic,” which turns out to be an elastic category. Or they say they are only fighting for “fair trade,” that they’d favor free trade but don’t want to disarm America by failing to respond to the protectionist measures other countries may enact.

Still, these figures help to clarify the stakes. Domestic jobs lost to international competition may be easy to identify and regret. That they are more visible, however, does not make them more numerous or more important than the jobs free trade creates in North Carolina.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

According to the most-recent ranking I can find, North Carolina requires state-approved licenses in more occupations (nearly 200) than most other states do. North Carolina licenses twice as many occupations as Virginia does, and three times as many as South Carolina.

You cannot be an auctioneer in our state unless you spend dozens of hours and hundreds of dollars to obtain a state permission slip. For some occupations, such as barbers and cosmetologists, the number of hours required runs into the thousands.

“What’s the big deal?” you may ask. Perhaps you think the promised health and safety benefits to consumers are worth the expense. Perhaps you think state policymakers have carefully weighed those benefits and costs.

Alas, you are mistaken. In most cases, occupational licensing comes about because current providers lobby for it. They seek to exclude competitors, so they can charge their customers more, or they seek to deliver the government-required training themselves, so they can collect the revenue.

Economists have produced reams of studies showing the inadvisability of licensing so many occupations. In most cases the policy just jacks up the price of services without conferring any measurable health or safety benefit. Sometimes licensure can actually make the public less safe, by driving some consumers to try do things themselves, such as home repairs, in order to escape high prices or long waits.

Consider this recent study published in ILR Review. It examined social workers in nursing homes. Because of a quirk in federal law, larger homes must hire licensed social workers while smaller homes have more flexibility. Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the regulation “works” in the sense that larger nursing homes higher 10% more licensed social workers. But they found “no evidence that the increase in licensure improves patient care quality, patient quality of life, or quality of social services provided.”

In another paper, researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Boston University used an online platform for home repairs to assess how much consumers value the licensure of contractors. “Our results show that more stringent licensing regulations are associated with less competition and higher prices,” they wrote, “but not with any improvement in customer satisfaction as measured by review ratings or the propensity to use the platform again.”

The adverse consequences of overregulation are particularly painful during tough economic times. A study in the Journal of Applied Business and Economics examined the relationship between state licensure and joblessness during the Great Recession of 2007-09. It found “higher increases in unemployment during and after the recession in counties that were in states imposing high licensing burdens.”

My John Locke Foundation colleague Jon Sanders has offered many potential reforms of North Carolina’s occupational-licensing laws. For example, policymakers could turn some licensing requirements into state-sponsored but voluntary certification. If consumers truly see such a certification as a signal of safety or good service, they will tend to buy from certified providers, giving others a financial incentive to obtain the formal training necessary to get certified. No coercion required.

Another alternative to licensure is interstate reciprocity. If workers are licensed in another state and then move to North Carolina, why make them jump through all the hoops again? It’s highly unlikely that doing so will significantly improve the quality of services delivered to consumers.

That’s the key point on occupational licensing, by the way. Of course would-be providers can be incompetent, irresponsible, or dishonest. Of course government has a legitimate role in policing, deterring, and remedying fraud, which is a violation of the good-faith principles of contract and mutual advantage that sustain a free society. But it does not follow that forcing individuals to obtain government licenses to sell their services is either an effective or necessary way to address the problem. And licensing systems are frequently and flagrantly misused to exclude competitors and gouge consumers.

North Carolina has made significant gains in economic freedom over the past decade. To continue that progress, we must make occupational-licensing reform a higher priority.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Before Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, he wrote his own epitaph. Did he mention any of his political offices? No. Jefferson wanted only three accomplishments listed on his gravestone: author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

In the latter effort, Jefferson was influenced by the ideas and experiences of a Baptist community he met while living at Monticello in the 1770s. Many of his Baptist neighbors later moved to western North Carolina, where they played a major role in the religious, social, and political life of our own state. But they had already left their mark on Jefferson — and, through him, the history of American freedom.

To be a Virginia Baptist in the years before the American Revolution was to risk fines, imprisonment, or worse. The colonial authorities wanted to halt the growth of Baptist, Methodist, and other denominations that questioned the power and tax funding of the Anglican Church.

In 1768, government officials in Spotsylvania County arrested Baptist minister Lewis Craig for preaching without a license. He was imprisoned for 43 days. That didn’t stop him. After his release, he helped other Baptist churches get their start, as did his brother Elijah Craig, a minister in neighboring Orange County.

If you keep moving westward from Spotsylvania through Orange, your next stop is Albemarle County. In the early 1770s, a small group of Albemarle residents began to meet in a barn to hold Baptist services. Rev. Elijah Craig sometimes visited to preach and advise the new congregation. In 1773, some members of the congregation founded their first formal church, Albemarle Baptist Church.

The listed founders of Albemarle Baptist included two of my 5th-great grandfathers, Thomas Coffey and Thomas Fields, plus some four dozen other residents, white and black. During its first few years, the church relied on visiting ministers – the Craig brothers among them – plus elders and deacons recruited from the membership. One was a 6th great-grandfather of mine, Rev. John Barlow.

During the mid-1770s Thomas Jefferson became acquainted with Albemarle Baptist Church, which was located close to Monticello. Although Jefferson was officially an Anglican, and privately a Christian freethinker, he apparently enjoyed an occasional visit to Albemarle Baptist for church services.

According to a story later told by First Lady Dolly Madison, who had it from Jefferson himself, one day Jefferson asked the pastor of the church, Andrew Tribble, to dine with him at Monticello. When Tribble asked Jefferson what he thought of the self-governing structure of Albemarle Baptist, Jefferson replied that it had “struck him with great force” and that “it would be the best plan for government of the American colonies.”

There is no question that the travails of the Albemarle Baptists and other religious dissenters during the 1760s and 1770s had a strong impression on Jefferson. He came to believe that the legislature should put explicit protections of religious liberty into Virginia law. In 1777, Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of his bill for Religious Freedom. After additional tinkering, he introduced it in 1779. It was approved several years later.

Among other provisions, it stated that to “compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”

While Lewis Craig, Elijah Craig, and their Baptist colleagues in Albemarle County had significantly influenced the drafting of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom, they weren’t around to see it enacted. Tired of waiting for the government to end its oppression of them, they left Virginia for less-oppressive climes. For example, in the early 1780s the Craig brothers led their Baptist congregations west to settle in Kentucky. (Somewhat improbably, given his faith, Elijah Craig later built a distillery and essentially invented the bourbon whiskey industry of Kentucky.)

Even before that, however, much of the Albemarle Baptist congregation had already sought their freedom in a different direction – moving southward to the North Carolina mountains. They left an impressive legacy behind them. Now it was time to create another.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

It’s my go-to slide. I’ve shown it to all the classes I teach at Duke University. The slide is striking. It’s revealing.

And now it’s out of date.

The slide in question is based on a longtime poll question from the Pew Research Center. It asks respondents which of two kinds of communities they’d prefer to live in. One option is described this way: “a community where the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores, and restaurants are within walking distance.” The alternative is a community “where the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores, and restaurants are several miles away.” The former is essentially the urban option and the latter the suburban one, although neither is labeled that way.

Why have I used this question about housing preference to teach students about political differences? Because the results served to depict both a closely divided electorate and a huge divide by ideology.

While the preferences of Americans tended to split roughly evenly between the two lifestyles — 49% suburban and 48% urban in 2014, and 48% suburban to 47% urban as recently as 2017 — about two-thirds of self-identified liberals picked the urban option and two-thirds of self-identified conservatives picked the suburban one.

To observe this partisan skew was never to deny that some conservatives enjoyed living in downtowns and some liberals like having more elbow room. Political views and partisan coalitions are messier than any one poll result can capture with precision. Nevertheless, the relative proportions told us something important. They certainly fascinated my students.

I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board, however, because what had been a stable trend over many years of polling has changed dramatically. In a Pew survey taken earlier this summer, 60% of Americans chose the suburban option, with only 39% opting for the urban one.

There’s still a partisan skew, to be sure, but some liberals have changed their minds. And many Americans who used to be on the fence, not just politically but also in their residential preferences, have now swung suburban.

I know what you’re thinking: this has to do with COVID-19. That’s true — in part.

Since the pandemic began in early 2020, housing markets and other indicators have confirmed a shift away from urban cores. People have recalculated the risk-reward ratio and concluded that living in a lower-density environment is more attractive than it used to be. Moreover, as employees were forced to work from home for many weeks or months, some found that they really liked the arrangement. It eliminated time-consuming commutes and allowed for a healthier work-life balance.

They won’t all get their way, of course. There are sectors and companies for which working from home makes it hard to build teams or evaluate performance. Still, we’ll never go back to where we were. Many more people will telecommute than before COVID. Freed from the necessity of living close to an office, their range of housing options is now greatly expanded. Especially if they have children at home or enjoy outdoor recreation, many are shopping for their next home out in the suburbs.

So why did I say COVID is only a partial explanation for the swing towards suburbia? Because it actually began in 2019, not 2020. A Pew survey from September 2019 found that 53% of Americans preferred the spread-out community and 47% the denser one.

My argument to my students was never that living in urban areas made you more progressive or living in suburban areas made you more conservative. Rather, differences in housing preferences reflect deeper divisions in lifestyles and priorities that also correlate with voting behavior.

Some surely think this suburban swing will be a disaster. They assume it will bring environmental degradation and social inequality. I think their analysis is outdated. More importantly, it is irrelevant. If this is what an increasing share of Americans want, good luck telling them they can’t have it.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I’ve long thought the North Carolina General Assembly should reform our state’s archaic and anti-competitive requirement for certificates-of-need. In the post-COVID world we are entering, however, CON reform is no longer just a good idea. It’s an imperative.

Created during the 1970s in response to a federal mandate, our certificate-of-need system requires hospitals, physicians, and other health providers to get what amounts to a permission slip from state regulators to purchase new equipment, add a service, or open a new location.

The original idea, believe it or not, was to reduce the cost of health care. Although restricting competition usually has the effect of jacking up prices and diminishing quality, CON advocates argue that health care isn’t like other sectors of the economy. Because so much of the bill is financed indirectly, by governments or private insurers, neither providers nor patients have sufficient incentives to control costs — at least when it comes to high-dollar services for which patients will quickly meet deductibles and copays.

If a hospital wants to maximize revenue, it can purchase, say, an MRI machine and then keep it busy through referrals by affiliated physicians, even when the potential diagnostic value for patients is modest. That’s the argument from CON proponents, anyway. They contend that only by limiting the number of MRI machines or other offerings can the state keep a lid on overutilization.

Third-party payment creates perverse incentives in medical care. That much is certainly true. But central planning by government bureaucrats isn’t the right answer. It rarely is.

Some 15 states have repealed their certificate-of-need laws. They could do so because the federal government, in a rare moment of wise introspection, got rid of its original CON mandate back in the 1980s. There was little evidence it was having the desired effect of dampening health-care inflation.

Since then, scholars have produced a mountain of studies examining CON laws from every angle. Many confirm the basic economic insight that if you protect incumbent providers from competition, you get higher prices and lower-quality services. In fairness, I’ll say that some studies show little relationship between CON and average costs. Even if those findings are true, though, it still means the system stymies medical innovation and consumer choice without any appreciable benefit.

Reformers have been trying to break up North Carolina’s medical cartels for many years. So why do I argue that the COVID pandemic has strengthened the case for immediate action? Well, consider this study recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Researchers from Brown University looked at the experience of vulnerable patients in nursing homes. After adjusting for other factors, they found that counties with larger-than-average nursing homes tended to have more confirmed COVID cases and faster growth in COVID caseloads than counties with smaller homes did. The study also found that counties subject to certificate-of-need laws had higher incidence of COVID.

The virus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of regulatory policy, of course. The likely causal factor here is that jurisdictions that restrict competition in nursing-home care tend to have fewer facilities, each with relatively large bed counts. Places with more robust competition tend to have more facilities with smaller bed counts.

This is only the latest study to confirm the negative effects on CON regulation on the quality and availability of medical care. On average, CON states have 30 percent fewer rural hospitals and 13 percent fewer rural ambulatory surgical centers compared to states without CON laws. “The elderly, the poor, people under time constraints, and people with emergency medical needs would be better served by having medical services nearby,” my John Locke Foundation colleague Jordan Roberts wrote, “rather than traveling to a hospital or clinic fortunate enough to have received CON approval for a service or procedure.”

It’s time to let providers and patients make decisions for themselves. It’s time to reform CON in North Carolina. The alternative, the status quo, has simply become too risky to tolerate any longer.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

In a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll taken on August 11 and 12, approximately 51% of Americans approved of President Joe Biden’s job performance, while 43% disapproved. Just one week later, the same pollster found a strikingly different result: 46% approval, 49% disapproval.

As far as I can tell, it’s the first time Biden has been underwater in a major media survey. Given the disastrous consequences of the president’s retreat from Afghanistan — an unwise policy carried out with gross incompetence — the Reuters/Ipsos finding will prove no outlier.

Indeed, the John Locke Foundation’s new Civitas Poll depicts Biden’s tumble with North Carolina voters in stark terms. Our state has a redder electorate than average, of course, so it was hardly surprising that Biden got mixed results in previous Civitas Polls taken during 2021. In June, the numbers looked like this: 46% approval to 48% disapproval. In the just-released August poll, however, only 42% of North Carolinians approved of the president’s job performance while 53% disapproved.

If you graph Biden’s support since his inauguration, you can see gradual deterioration. That’s normal for presidents, who typically start out with skeptical voters willing to give a new leader the benefit of the doubt. Over time, some are won over. Others are lost. And partisan loyalties often reassert themselves.

But I don’t see the Afghanistan debacle as a garden-variety political dispute about budgets, regulations, or judicial nominations. Although the prospect disgusts me, I consider it highly likely that American citizens, not to mention Afghan allies, will be captured, brutalized, and perhaps even executed in front of video cameras.

If I’m right, public support for the president will crater. If Biden and the Democrats expect the issue to go away quickly, they are guilty of yet another catastrophic lapse in judgment.

Because I know many smart Democrats, in North Carolina and elsewhere, I suspect they are not so unrealistic. They know public confidence in the president is tottering on the edge of a cliff. They know that their own political fortunes are inextricably tied to his.

In the Locke poll, for example, North Carolina Republicans now lead Democrats by four percentage points in generic-ballot tests for Congress and legislature. Gov. Roy Cooper’s longtime net-approval has disappeared. There are other political issues in play, naturally, but like it or not the Afghanistan story is dominating the public’s attention.

Perhaps the president’s costly mistakes, and manifest inability to explain or take real responsibility for them, bother Democratic political operatives as much as they do everyone else. Or perhaps they are just unnerved by the sudden and sharp decline in their party’s political fortunes in the coming midterm elections. Something must explain why the politicos who run the Democratic caucus of the North Carolina House resorted last week to a grotesque calumny against the John Locke Foundation, the think tank I helped found and ran for a quarter of a century.

On August 19, a man from Grover, North Carolina parked a pickup in front of the Library of Congress for several hours, claiming to have explosives and rambling on about Afghanistan and the president. The authorities quite properly treated it as a potential terrorist incident. Thank goodness they were able to bring it to a close and take the man into custody without injury or loss of life.

“While we are grateful this ordeal is over,” snarled a tweet from the official account for North Carolina House Democrats, “it is a reminder of the continued danger posed by the extreme narrative being pushed by groups like @FoxNews, @ncgop, and @JohnLockeNC.”

There is no evidence linking the pickup driver’s actions to any messages conveyed by the Locke Foundation or the other institutions. To allege otherwise is, as Locke CEO Amy Cooke and President Donald Bryson put it, “abhorrent to civil government.”

I can understand Democratic activists being anxious and fearful about their party’s immediate future. But its problems weren’t concocted by conservative media outlets. They were birthed in the White House.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The University of North Carolina systemically discriminates by race and ethnicity in student admissions and faculty hiring. Arguably such behavior is already forbidden by federal and state law. Now a group of state lawmakers has proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would eliminate all doubt on the matter.

Senate Bill 729 is admirably brief. Here’s the pivotal paragraph: “The State and its political subdivisions, including the free public schools and public institutions of higher education, shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

This is the proper policy for a free and just society. It is also broadly supported by the general public. That’s why defenders of racial preferences will fight tooth and nail to keep the issue away from voters. That’s why they call it a “ban on affirmative action,” which it most assuredly is not.

I guess I should explain that the anti-discrimination amendment in question was proposed by a Republican, Senate leader Phil Berger, and has attracted only Republican sponsors to date. They believe, correctly, that no agency of state government should take race or other extraneous factors into account when hiring public employees or determining access to public services.

After generations of discrimination against African-Americans and other minority groups, Congress banned the practice more than half a century ago. In doing so, Congress explicitly did not authorize public (or private) institutions to remedy past discrimination by engaging in ongoing discrimination against whites or, more recently, against “privileged” minorities such as Americans of Chinese, Japanese, or Indian descent.

Yes, some courts have reinterpreted civil-rights laws to allow for just such discriminatory acts, while often stipulating that such an extreme remedy should remain rare and disappear quickly. It did neither. That’s why the residents of places such as California and Michigan stepped in years ago to ban racial preferences by state law or constitutional amendment. That’s why North Carolinians should be given the opportunity to do the same today.

To ban the use of race, ethnicity, sex, or national origin in university admissions or hiring is not to ban affirmative action in the form of vigorous outreach efforts to ensure that pools of applicants are as diverse as possible. It is a ban on making the final decisions based on such characteristics.

In other words, affirmative action does not equal racial preferences. When supposedly neutral news media described Sen. Berger’s proposal as a “ban on affirmative action,” they were either exhibiting their ignorance or willfully misleading their audiences.

Fortunately, their audiences are not so gullible. Polling confirms that the vast majority of people understand this distinction. In surveys by the Pew Research Center, for example, most Americans say they’re worried about race relations and continue to support the concept of “affirmative action.” But only 26% of respondents said race should be a factor in university admissions. Most African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans said it shouldn’t be a factor.

Similarly, a 2019 Pew survey found that most Americans think it’s good to promote diversity in the workplace. But here’s another question from the same poll: “When it comes to decisions about hiring and promotions, do you think companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account, in addition to their qualifications, in order to increase diversity in the workplace (or) should only take a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity in the workplace.” Just 24% favored the first option, to take race and ethnicity in account in hiring, with 74% saying employers should take only the applicants’ qualifications into account.

Polls by Gallup and other organizations generally produce the same results. If Senate Bill 729 passes the legislature, North Carolina voters will approve it. That’s why its comparatively few — but powerful — foes are so desperate to keep it off the ballot.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Why won’t North Carolina Democrats accept the results of an election? Don’t they believe in democracy?

In 2018, North Carolinians went to the polls to cast ballots for congressional, legislative, and local candidates. They also voted on several constitutional amendments. One of them required the presentation of a photo ID in order to vote. The measure was extensively debated for months. Some 1.6 million voted against it. Just over 2 million voted for it. By a 55% to 45% margin, North Carolinians added a photo-ID requirement to the state constitution.

But it has never been implemented. Democratic politicians and progressive activists refused to let the majority have its say. They sued. The issue remains in litigation.

Now, let me answer those initial questions. First, why won’t North Carolina Democrats accept the results of that 2018 election? Because they don’t like the outcome.

Second, does resorting to court challenge mean that these Democrats and activists don’t believe in democracy? No. They believe that in a free society, direct democracy must face some constraints. They believe that even if a majority of the population favors a particular policy, that shouldn’t necessarily lead to the policy being implemented.

I don’t agree with them about requiring photo IDs to vote. It’s a reasonable, low-cost precaution against a low-probability but potentially outrageous result: fraudulent votes determining the outcome of an election. But I do agree with them about the underlying principle of necessary constraints on democracy. You do, too, though you may not have thought about the issue in those terms.

That is, if you believe in America’s system of constitutional government, you think a mix of democratic and non-democratic elements is better than a simple majoritarian democracy. You favor checks and balances, including checks on the power of elected lawmakers and balancing popular will with individual rights. You aren’t just comfortable with judges (including appointed ones) striking down laws that most voters favor. You’d be upset if judges didn’t exercise such a power.

Consider the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law” abridging the freedoms of religious exercise, speech, press, assembly, and petition. The argument was never that restricting core freedoms is okay as long as it’s the majority who does it.

During segregation, the right of African-Americans to vote in federal, state, and local elections was routinely denied in many places. But even if it hadn’t been, even if blacks had been voting in those places at rates compared to whites, the latter would often have prevailed in democratic elections. That wouldn’t have given white-run governments the moral authority to infringe on the personal and economic freedoms of their black neighbors. Nor would it have rescued such Jim Crow policies from being overturned by federal judges in defense of constitutional rights.

In Aristotle’s classic work Politics, he articulates two different definitions of freedom. “One principle of liberty,” he writes in Part 2 of Book 6, “is for all to rule and be ruled in turn,” by which he means that “the majority must be supreme, and that whatever the majority approve must be the end and the just.” But that is only “one note of liberty which all democrats affirm to be the principle of their state,“ he continues. “Another is that a man should live as he likes.”

There’s an inherent tension here, as Aristotle recognized thousands of years ago and that we still see and experience today. Majority wins (or, at least, plurality wins) is the proper decision rule for electing politicians and settling some other questions. It is not the only proper decision rule in a constitutional republic, however. Constitutions are essentially supermajority requirements that constrain government action. Some progressives, exhibiting either bad faith or an embarrassing lack of self-awareness, accuse conservatives of being “against democracy” when we make procedural arguments or file lawsuits challenging a policy that was enacted by a majoritarian institution.

It’s a silly claim. And they don’t really mean it.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Just about everyone has an opinion about how to improve education, and it’s usually an opinion passionately held and forcefully argued. It’s not hard to see why. After all, schools are the single-largest expenditure of state taxpayers’ funds. Educational mediocrity is the common denominator of many other social maladies. Most folks have spouses, siblings, parents, or other family members in the teaching profession. And everyone has been a student.

In one sense, this very-broad, very-public chattering about educational policy can be seen as bad news. Because district-run public schools so long enjoyed an overwhelming monopoly in the delivery of education, issues were thrust into the public discourse that, if related to any other profession, wouldn’t be heard outside of professional circles.

Politicians and political activists have to debate such matters as critical race theory or the proper role of phonics in reading instruction, given the current environment. But in a more diverse and competitive market for education services, parents and educators would gravitate towards the schools that best reflect their preferences and best succeed at teaching students what their parents and educators wish to teach them.

That’s not the world we live in, at least not yet. Educationally, we live in a world created in large part by policymakers and educators inspired by the “progressive education” notions of philosopher John Dewey. The extent to which the public-school establishment venerates Dewey, purveyor of some of the most noxious ideas of the past century, is the extent to which it is destined to fail at its appointed task of imparting knowledge, skills, and understanding.

Some years ago, Henry Edmondson, a professor of political science at Georgia College, chronicled Dewey’s wrongheaded approach to education policy (and to many other issues, economic and political) in a book entitled John Dewey & the Decline of American Education. His subtitle read, “How the patron saint of schools has corrupted teaching and learning.” The book delivered on that promise.

One of the ironies Edmondson explored is that despite Dewey’s saintly status — or perhaps because of it — his ideas are typically encountered secondhand and accepted as doctrine rather than consumed directly from his books and articles. One could devote whole tomes to arguing with Dewey, who was at least prolific, but Edmondson chose to spend much of his book simply laying out Dewey’s stated philosophy and providing extensive quotations. That’s damning enough.

Here are some of the most revealing Deweyisms:

• Dewey argued for the liberation of students, by which he meant “freedom from authority, freedom from the curriculum, [and] freedom from convention.”

• “Boys and girls alike take the same interest in all these occupations, whether they are sewing and playing with dolls, or marble making and carpentry. . . It does not occur to a boy that dolls are not just as fascinating and legitimate a plaything for him as for his sister, until someone puts the idea into his head.”

• “‘It thinks’ is a truer psychological statement than ‘I think.’”

• Dewey dismissed traditional civics education as a preoccupation with the “established mechanisms” of American government that approaches “idolatry of the Constitution.” He also rejected the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, writing that “self-evident truths have been weakened by historic and by philosophic criticism” and have become “emotional cries” that lack “practical meaning.”

The progressive education movement, essentially founded by Dewey’s disciples, wreaked havoc on schools for decades. Perhaps this should not have come as a surprise, as Edmondson reports:

“The most astonishing symbol of education’s surrealistic separation between theory and practice is this: although he has told millions how to teach elementary and secondary students, John Dewey himself was a poor teacher. He had trouble maintaining discipline in both the secondary teaching posts he occupied, and when he left the latter in Charlotte, Vermont, ‘the townspeople … were glad to see him depart.’”

I’ll be glad to see his legacy depart Charlotte, North Carolina — and everywhere else it persists, including our schools of education.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When demand exceeds supply, prices rise. While the problem of housing affordability has many facets and effects, that inescapable fact explains a lot about why so many North Carolinians struggle to afford the homes they’d like to buy or rent.

It’s not as if there are many idle homebuilders in our state. In fact, by one measure North Carolina is doing better than average. When the Manhattan Institute compared job growth to new housing permits in 20 fastest-growing metropolitan areas, the three North Carolina metros on the list fared very well: Durham-Chapel Hill (#1), Raleigh-Cary (#3), and Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia (#4)

Alas, this isn’t the whole story. It misses an important stock-and-flow dynamic. Yes, over the past decade North Carolina metros have been more accommodating than most of their peers in allowing new home starts to keep up with new residents. But our state began the decade with too many consumers chasing too few housing units. Despite recent construction, we aren’t adding enough housing stock.

Take a look at the most-recent affordability data from the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo Bank. Their study compares the median sales price of homes to the median income in each jurisdiction. For the first quarter of 2021, NAHB/Wells Fargo produced affordability scores for 233 metros. North Carolina’s highest-ranking places for home affordability were Fayetteville (32) and Winston-Salem (58).

Greensboro-High Point (96), Raleigh-Cary (102), Durham-Chapel Hill (113), Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia (124), and Asheville (150) face bigger challenges. Our housing markets aren’t as locked up as those in California or New York, to be sure. That’s one reason why Californians and New Yorkers (among others) continue to move here in significant numbers. But home affordability in North Carolina is still a worrisome problem.

Most policymakers agree with that, of course. Where they disagree is how North Carolina state and local governments should go about trying to address it.

For decades, my John Locke Foundation colleagues and I have recommended that we loosen housing and zoning regulations to make it easier to provide housing to people of modest means. Yes, that means allowing more units per acre of (increasingly pricey) land. It means duplexes and triplexes. It means allowing homeowners to rent out spare rooms. It even means allowing more manufactured housing within municipal limits (modern units bear little relationship to old-fashioned trailers, by the way).

A serious effort to promote affordability in North Carolina also means reducing how long it takes — from planning stage to final construction — for homebuilders to bring new inventory to market. It means streamlining the process for obtaining permits. It means letting producers and consumers meet in the middle, trading off amenities for price, rather than imposing housing codes that reflect the preferences of existing residents over those of newcomers.

Such an effort, then, isn’t just about the precise wording of laws or the detailed analysis of regulations. It’s about public attitudes.

Do people other than buyers and sellers have a legitimate interest in the amount and type of housing stock erected in the community? To a limited extent, yes, regarding public services such as roads or water and sewer. That interest need not result in excessive regulation, however. Localities can and do charge developers directly, and thus prospective newcomers indirectly, for the cost of adding infrastructure capacity to accommodate them. Such a practice is not about saying no. It’s about saying yes — at the right price.

Let’s be honest, though: when the “neighborhood” resists new construction or higher density, it’s not just about traffic or stormwater runoff. Preexisting residents want to keep “things” the way they were when they moved in. More trees. Fewer people driving or walking by. Structures and landscapes that existing residents admire when they drive or walk by.

Here’s a principle we should all take to heart: when we buy or rent a place to live, we don’t purchase a right to oversee how many neighbors we’ll have — or how they choose to live their lives.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

How much say should the public have about public education? Parental revolts against “wokeness” fads in the classroom are all the rage right now, but gaps between public preferences and the practice of public education didn’t suddenly begin a few months ago. They’ve been around for decades.

In my experience, for example, most non-educators believe teacher pay ought to vary according to demonstrable performance in the classroom. Most public-school teachers I know dislike this idea. Recent polling confirms the gap: in a 2019 survey, 72% of the general public supported “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn.” Only 42% of teachers agreed.

This does not mean, strictly speaking, that teachers oppose merit pay. It depends on how the term is defined. One might assume that more-experienced teachers tend to be more effective than less-experienced ones, or that teachers with more formal education, as signified by graduate degrees, tend to produce better results.

Most teachers do, indeed, assume these propositions are true, and overwhelmingly support pay boosts based on years of experience and academic credentials.

In truth, the empirical link between experience and effectiveness is not perfectly linear (you get bigger gains from experience earlier in a teacher’s career), and the link between graduate degrees and effectiveness is largely a fiction (except for certain high-level math and science classes). But if you assume the propositions to be true, then you think paying more for experience and graduate degrees constitutes merit pay.

Now, is the general public right to assume that teacher quality can be directly measured, by value-added test scores or supervisors or some combination? If so, we need not use roundabout means (years on the jobs or degrees earned) to identify and reward high performance. We can use performance-based pay to increase average teacher quality in at least three ways, by 1) incentivizing teachers to perform at their highest capacity, 2) encouraging high-performing teachers to stay in the profession, and 3) nudging low-performing teachers to exit the profession.

My guess that the second and third mechanisms are more important than the first. You probably don’t care about my guesswork, however. Is there any hard evidence for merit pay?

Yes. Independent researchers have studied these questions for decades. Some answers remain tentative and hard to interpret. Other results are more immediately useful. In general, they find that merit pay improves teacher quality, although it depends on the specific program studied and the specific variables assessed.

In early 2020, the American Educational Research Journal published a meta-analysis that brought together findings from 37 different studies, including 26 papers that examined teacher-pay programs in the United States. The researchers found that the use of merit pay was associated with statistically significant gains in student test scores.

That doesn’t mean that every model produced positive gains. Nor were those positive gains gigantic. That’s okay — moderate gains in student learning are hard enough to accomplish in education reform, and can accumulate into substantial benefits over time.

Delving more deeply into the meta-analysis, the researchers found that student gains were larger in math than in language, larger in elementary school than in higher grades, and tended to be larger in the early years of implementing performance pay. When the pay boost teachers could earn was bigger, the benefits for students were bigger. And when pay boosts were predicated on the performance of groups rather than of individual teachers, the benefits for students disappeared.

While this paper combines findings from dozens of prior studies, it shouldn’t be treated as the final word. Indeed, there is no final word when it comes to research, whether in the social sciences or any other discipline! We should always be open to the possibility that future studies will refine our understanding of an inherently complicated issue.

At the moment, however, the General Assembly and other policymakers should continue to enact and implement performance pay for teachers. The public has this one right.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

There are at least as many different ways to explain the origins of political disagreement as there are political commentators. I, for one, think such factors as cultural traditions, religious views, family background, educational experiences, and interpersonal relationships all help to shape how we choose our preferred political candidates or “sides” – and how we choose to act on those preferences.

Whatever the origins of political disagreement, one way to think about it is that it reflects different assumptions about the purpose of political action. For some, politics is about doing good. For others, politics is about doing better.

I’m not playing a Wicked the Musical word game here. Those who define politics as “doing good” tend to evaluate political action by intentions. If you think of yourself as seeking to do good, then you tend to see those with whom you come to disagree as either seeking to do harm or not seeking much of anything at all, except perhaps political power for its own sake. Both alternatives look abhorrent to you.

Those who define politics as “doing better,” on the other hand, tend to evaluate political action by results. Unless you are an anarchist – in which case you spend your time theorizing about people and conditions that don’t actually exist – you recognize that political action has the potential to make you and your neighbors safer, wealthier, and happier. But these outcomes are comparative and far from guaranteed. Some government programs might well increase the safety of your person and property. Others might well imperil your living standards, your liberty, or your life. The intention of the program is, in this context, utterly irrelevant.

History is full of examples of governments generating both benefits and costs for their citizens that no one intended – or even could have intended.

Consider the basic architecture of the Internet. Progressives are quite right in observing that federal spending was integral to its creation. But in funding the development of the Internet’s infrastructure and protocols, government’s intention was not to give shoppers the ability to buy Star Wars paraphernalia or tweeters the chance to debate the superiority of the Justice League to the Avengers. The federal government was seeking to secure critical assets and information in the event of war.

The commercial, intellectual, and recreational applications of the Internet were unintended byproducts of this work, much as previous generations of tinkerers and innovators had adapted military advances in metallurgy, construction, shipbuilding, and ballistics to create other wonders of the modern world. (If you truly want to turn swords into plowshares, in other words, build a dynamic, competitive private economy and turn it loose.)

Examples of the unintended costs of government action are just as prevalent. Welfare programs aimed at alleviating immediate suffering can instead create greater suffering in the future by reducing the incentive to work, save, or form families. Regulatory programs aimed at improving the moral character of the population can instead push regulated behavior (such as alcohol consumption during Prohibition) off into the shadows, where it may fester outside our immediate gaze, increasing the level of risk, criminality, corruption, and disrespect for the law in areas where it deserves to be respected.

No political movement is immune from intentionality bias. Over the past five years, far too many Republicans have come to believe their rivals aren’t just misguided but actively evil, just as too many Democrats view Republicans as, inevitably, bigots and villains.

Still, I would submit that the modern Left remains more likely to judge government action according to intentions, and to see those with whom they disagree not as mistaken but as malicious. And the modern Right remains more likely to subject government policies to evaluation by outcomes, measured against what one might expect from alternative policies.

In other words, conservatives and libertarians are more likely to heed the warning of economist Milton Friedman that “concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Most students attend colleges or universities primarily to acquire the knowledge, skills, and credentials required to get a rewarding job.

That’s what most college students say in surveys. That’s what most parents think they are helping to finance. You can also divine student intentions by looking at how they choose to spend most of their academic time while on campus.

According to the most-recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, American institutions awarded just over two million degrees to undergraduate students during the 2018-19 academic year. Some 19% of these graduates majored in business and another 26% in some other professional discipline such as health care, recreation and leisure, communications, or public service.

Another 84,000 undergraduate degrees, about 4% of the 2019 total, were in education. That’s another professional major, of course, but worth singling out for special consideration because it’s been shrinking rather than growing over time. In 1971, colleges and universities awarded 176,000 education degrees, about one-fifth of all undergraduate degrees conferred. By 2010, the number of education degrees had fallen to 102,000 (6% of the total).

What’s left? Degrees in STEM fields — physical sciences, technology, engineering, and math — made up 23% of all undergraduate degrees in 2019, up from 17% in 2010. The social sciences accounted for 15% of the 2019 total. The remaining 13% of majors were in the humanities, including such fields as literature, philosophy, religion, the visual and performing arts, and what the Education Department calls “area, ethnic, cultural, and group studies.”

Speaking of which, I’ll now narrow the focus to majors that have experienced either outsized growth or significant shrinkage since 2010. By “outsized growth,” I mean majors that represent a significant share of the total and that had growth rates at least double the national average (overall, undergraduate degrees went up 22% from 2010 to 2019). As for “significant shrinkage,” I mean majors that went down by double-digit percentages.

Here are the disciplines showing outsized growth: computer and information science (124%); health professions (94%); engineering (74%); mathematics and statistics (63%); parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies (61%); and agriculture and natural resources (54%).

And here are the disciplines experiencing significant shrinkage: English language and literature (-26%), foreign language and literature (-23%), philosophy and religious studies (-23%), education (-17%), architecture (-12%), and area or ethnic studies (-10%).

Trends within the University of North Carolina system generally match the national ones, with a few deviations here and there. Most undergraduates major in business or some other professional program. STEM majors are growing rapidly, too, while many humanities majors are experiencing either stagnant or declining enrollments.

These are simply facts. What they mean is, naturally, a debatable proposition.

Some argue that many students are entering those vocation-specific majors reluctantly, having taken on substantial debt to finance the ever-escalating price tag for the four or more years it takes to get an undergraduate degree. If relieved of the financial burden — either by federal debt forgiveness or higher state subsidy or both — they’d welcome the opportunity to major in literature, classics, history, or philosophy for their intrinsic value rather than having to prioritize the prospect for success in the job market.

Others argue that whatever the merits and appeal of the humanities may be in theory, current academic practice is a major turnoff. Too many professors prefer to teach courses based on their own narrow, often idiosyncratic research interests rather than teaching about the great ideas, institutions, people, and works of art that students actually want to study. And because so much of the content is drenched in grievance, identity politics, and radical leftism, many potential majors are either bored or actively repelled by it.

Personally, I’d love to see more students majoring in the humanities. If policymakers agree, there are two steps they can take. First, reduce the actual cost of getting a degree (which is not the same as increasing the subsidy). Second, depoliticize the subject matter.

Both are, sadly, easier said than done.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

For years, North Carolina conservatives and progressives argued incessantly about the effects of the state’s rightward turn. Conservatives said lower taxes and less regulation tend to boost entrepreneurship, job creation, and economic growth. Rejecting that position, progressives argued that spending more money on education and other public programs and making greater use of health, safety, and labor regulations would have net-positive results for the economy.

I’ve been an active participant in these spirited debates. But what if (gulp) it was much ado about not very much?

It was in 2013 that the Republican-led General Assembly and newly elected Republican Gov. Pat McCrory enacted many of policies in question — from sweeping tax cuts and spending restraint to unemployment insurance and regulatory reforms. Conservatives predicted higher growth. Progressives predicted lower growth.

Well, from mid-2013 to the first quarter of 2021, North Carolina’s gross domestic product grew by a compound annual rate of 2.1%, adjusted for inflation. The national average growth rate was 2%. For the Southeastern region, it was 1.9%. For per-capita income, the three averages — state, regional, national — were identical.

The growth-rate differentials were larger when it comes to jobs. From June 2013 to May 2021, total employment grew 10.4% in North Carolina, vs. a regional average of 8% and a national average of 6.3%. Still, some “bluer” states posted comparable rates of job creation during the same period.

When it comes to economic growth, I’ve cautioned politicians of both parties and activists of all stripes not to overstate their respective cases. Regardless of what you think government ought to do, you should keep your expectations reasonable.

Most of the time, GDP growth rates of American states are closely correlated. This is especially true for nearby jurisdictions. If South Carolina’s economy is growing robustly, North Carolina’s economy probably is, too. If Tennessee’s economy takes a nose dive, don’t expect North Carolina’s to soar into the clouds.

Moreover, whatever theory of public finance or regulation you buy, you should grant that policy effects are likely to be gradual and relatively modest. For instance, if you think cutting the corporate income tax will produce more investment, job creation, and income gains for state residents, you should grant that most corporations do not frequently move large-scale operations from state to state based on two-, three-, or four-point differences in marginal tax rates. Companies produce their goods or services where they do for a host of reasons, and may incur substantial costs in relocation that wouldn’t be made up for from annual tax savings for a long time.

Similarly, if you believe that businesses would be more likely to come to North Carolina if our educational attainment and achievement were higher, you should grant that even large funding increases would take a very long time to manifest themselves in more and highly performing workers — even if we assume, rather precariously, that increased funding would boost attainment or achievement more than a modest amount.

Simply eyeballing economic statistics, as I did earlier in this column, can’t really answer the underlying questions. You have to construct econometric models that account for multiple variables. Having read hundreds of such studies over the years, I conclude that lower taxes and less regulation tend to boost state economic growth when all other things are held equal.

That’s a more modest claim that saying either that North Carolina’s economy will shoot off like a rocket or that it will crash and burn based on what the governor or state legislature may decide to do. Neither outcome is likely. We should acknowledge that factors entirely outside the control of state leaders — national policies, international trade flows, technological innovations, or emergencies such as storms or diseases — will often have such large and lumpy effects that the effects of state policy become hard to discern.

We ought to keep debating these issues, of course. But we should also practice humility and keep things in perspective. Not the current fashion, I know. Don’t care.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

One of the best ways to save black lives and help poor North Carolinians would be to increase funding for North Carolina police departments and sheriffs.

That’s the core recommendation of a new report by my John Locke Foundation colleague Jon Guze, an attorney who heads up Locke’s legal studies. Although his thesis may sound counterintuitive in our present political moment, it is based on recent history, sound reasoning, and well-established research findings.

The first and foremost responsibility of any government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of its citizens. Performing that function well requires, among other things, enacting protective laws and then funding law enforcement agencies and the courts to ensure those laws are applied swiftly and justly to deter crime.

Of course, governments can spend tax money poorly even on core functions. In the case of criminal justice, however, Guze convincingly argues that during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, North Carolina and other states didn’t lean too much into law enforcement. They leaned too much into incarceration.

From 1950 to 1975, for example, American governments spent about $3 on police for every $1 on prisons. By the early 21st century, the ratio has fallen to $1.5 on police for every $1 on prisons.

“While the extent to which mass incarceration helped bring about the eventual decline in crime rates is contested, it almost certainly had at least a modest deterrent effect,” Guze writes. “The costs of achieving that modest level of deterrence, however, were extremely high. It required an enormous increase in public funding. . . and it added considerably to the woes of the poor and black communities that were already carrying so much of the burden of the crime wave.”

That last point underlines why fighting crime effectively tends to produce tremendous benefits for African-Americans, by the way. It isn’t just that blacks account for a disproportionate share of the incarcerated population — and thus of former inmates who may struggle to get work or otherwise reenter society. It is also that blacks make up a disproportionate share of crime victims.

In 2019, about two whites out of 100,000 were victims of a reported crime. For blacks, the rate was 17 out of 100,000. After decades of decline, homicides and other violent crimes are surging right now in many cities, including several here in our state. Guze argues that black and poor North Carolinians will pay a heavy price unless state and local officials get out ahead of the problem.

That means hiring more police officers, paying them more, and providing them better training. And it means deploying them in a true “community policing” model, one designed to discourage people from committing crimes in the first place rather than one designed to maximize arrest and detention rates.

Guze cites numerous studies that demonstrate a link between effective policing and public safety. When well-meaning activists chant “defund the police” as a means of protecting people’s lives and dignity, they reveal a misunderstanding the causal relationships involved. “Deploying more active-duty police officers in high-crime, high-disorder communities,” he writes, “will result in fewer crimes. Fewer crimes will mean fewer arrests and convictions. And fewer arrests and convictions will mean lower levels of incarceration.”

Again, while his case for more (and more effective) policing may sound odd to some ears, Guze is providing a new and innovative argument for ancient wisdom and common sense. His argument also happens to constitute sound political advice for policymakers across the spectrum. Democrats already discovered during the 2020 cycle that any hint of a “defund the police” mentality is electoral poison in any jurisdiction that isn’t colored deep-blue. As for Republicans, embracing community policing as a fiscal priority is likely to be save significant money for taxpayers in the long run, although its upfront costs may be substantial.

It’s worth it. None of us should want to see North Carolina’s homicide rate continue to rise — because, yes, all black lives matter.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Because political behavior is a rich and fascinating field of study, you can find many valid and useful theories to explain why conservatives and progressives disagree about the proper role of government. Here’s one with salience right now: the Right and Left disagree about personal agency.

That is, conservatives tend to believe that individuals are largely responsible for their own lot in life — by working hard, making the right choices, or at least learning the right lessons from the wrong choices we all make from time to time. On the contrary, most progressives respond, larger social structures and impersonal forces shape our fates more than our personal decisions do.

In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, for example, respondents were asked to choose between two propositions: 1) “most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard,” or 2) “hard work is no guarantee of success for most people.” Among self-identified conservative Republicans, 84% agreed with the first statement. Among self-identified liberal Democrats, 66% agreed with the second.

In another 2019 poll, the Cato Institute asked to what extent Americans agreed or disagreed with this: “My life is determined by my own actions.” While 52% of “very conservative” respondents said they “strongly agreed,” just 33% of “very liberal” respondents did.

A year earlier, the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey asked this question: “On the average, African-Americans have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are mainly due to discrimination?” Yes, said 62% of extreme liberals. No, said 67% of extreme conservatives.

Now think about current disputes about the 1619 Project, critical race theory, implicit-bias testing, and other flashpoints in the debate about “woke” culture. To many progressives, conservative resistance to these causes reflects some combination of bigotry, ignorance, and political gamesmanship. And to many conservatives, these left-wing causes reflect — you guessed it — the bigotry, ignorance, and political gamesmanship of progressives.

On the substance of the specific issues in contention, my concerns track with those of other conservatives. I’ve written about them extensively. But for my part, I feel no need to question the motives or intelligence of progressives who disagree. For one thing, it won’t do any good. Human beings rarely abandon deeply felt values because other humans beings ridicule or attack them.

For another thing, most Americans are neither extremely conservative nor extremely progressive. They don’t think of themselves, their values, their relationships, and their communities in ideological terms. Although they’ve become more likely over time to vote consistently for Democrats or Republicans, rather than splitting their tickets, their views on controversial issues are often mixed and even in tension. They often resist binary choices.

Speaking of which, take another look at the poll questions I described earlier. They required respondents to choose between alternatives, to be sure, but the stated alternatives allowed for nuance. The Pew question asks if “most” people can get ahead if they work hard, allowing for the possibility that some cannot. The GSS question asks if racial gaps are “mainly” the consequence of discrimination, which is different from asking respondents if they think discrimination is a problem.

I’d guess virtually every “extreme” conservative would grant that some Americans experience adverse outcomes despite working hard and playing by the rules. And virtually every “extreme” progressive would grant that personal effort can produce success for at least some individuals who face discrimination or other societal barriers.

What does everyone else believe? On balance, Americans put more stock in personal agency. Of the total Pew sample, 60% said most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard. Of the total Cato sample, 74% agreed more than they disagreed with the statement that “my life is determined by my own actions.” And on the GSS question, only 38% said racial gaps were mainly caused by discrimination.

I think most Americans are correct about this. Disagree? Then make sound arguments to the contrary. Name-calling doesn’t count.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Will North Carolina Republicans have smashing victories in the 2022 midterms? Many politicos are acting as if they will, and it isn’t hard to understand why.

Since the advent of the modern party system, the party controlling the presidency has almost always suffered losses in midterm elections. The party tends to lose seats in the U.S. Senate and House. It tends to lose governorships and other state offices.

The anti-White House wave typically reaches legislative and local races, as well. Since 1970, the president’s party has lost an average of 13 seats in the North Carolina General Assembly in the midterms. If something like that happened in 2022, the Republicans would likely reclaim supermajorities in both legislative chambers. There are also two seats up for North Carolina Supreme Court. If the GOP picks up just one of them, it would reclaim a majority there, as well.

You can tell that Republicans are feeling optimistic about 2022, and that Democrats are pessimistic. You can hear it in legislative debates about the state budget and other issues. Although Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was reelected last year, his margin of victory proved to be modest. His political capital is rapidly diminishing.

You can also see it in progressives’ current panic about the long-running Leandro school-funding case, where they thought they’d finally got themselves into a position to enact their preferred education policies by judicial fiat. They are now recognizing that any penalties their pet judge attempts to impose on state legislators to enforce this power grab will likely be appealed to a high court more defensive of the legislature’s constitutional powers to levy and appropriate state revenue.

To both partisan camps, and to North Carolinians who aren’t yet focused on the politics of 2022 (bless them!), I offer these four words: don’t jump to conclusions.

Political patterns exhibit probabilities, yes, but not certainties. The past few years, in particular, should have disabused anyone of the notion that electoral outcomes are perfectly predictable. Donald Trump surprised most pundits (including me) by drawing the political equivalent of an inside straight in 2016 and winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote by a significant margin.

In 2018, GOP lost the U.S. House but did better than expected in Senate races. In 2020, Joe Biden’s victory matched the conventional wisdom but his margins were small in key states, while Republicans surprisingly gained House seats and then surprisingly lost the U.S. Senate in Georgia by blowing two runoff elections.

It isn’t just the case that political polling produces noisy signals, although that has always been the case and recent events should discipline us to remember that. It is also the case that America’s political coalitions are continuing to change in subtle and unpredictable ways.

For example, when Republicans became truly competitive in North Carolina politics during the 1970s and 1980s, much of their gains occurred in urban counties such as Mecklenburg, Guilford, and Wake. Yellow-dog Democrats still often prevailed in rural areas. Over the subsequent three decades, that dynamic changed. Republicans came to dominate rural counties, except in places where African-Americans formed a significant chunk of the population. At the same time, Republicans lost ground in core urban counties, retaining their majorities in fast-growing suburbs but sometimes with smaller margins.

Will the GOP snap back to judicial majorities and legislative supermajorities in 2022? That will depend not simply on statistical probabilities but on key decisions that both parties are making right now. If Democrats continue their flirtation with extreme positions on policing, public disorder, and a “woke” curriculum for public schools, their candidates will pay for it. Similarly, if Republicans recruit candidates more interested in “owning the libs” and indulging conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections than governing the state, that will limit their potential gains.

The current legislative maps, while Republican-drawn, are not so skewed as to preordain the outcome. It will come down to candidate recruitment, fundraising, and messaging. Basic blocking and tackling. Nothing is inevitable.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolinians disagree about a great deal. But here’s a proposition virtually all of us endorse: the future of our state is closely tied to the amount and quality of education our people receive.

I could say the future of North Carolina’s economy depends on better education — and I’d be right! You only have to listen to what employers say about the importance of skilled employees who exhibit creativity, collaboration, and a strong work ethic. You only have to listen to what employees say about the value of what they learned, or should have learned, in school. And you only have to scan the dozens of studies that link average test scores or educational attainment to GDP and income growth.

To focus on economic considerations alone wouldn’t full capture what I mean, though. Education encompasses more than vocational training. It introduces learners to great swaths of human experience and accomplishment. It broadens perspective. It provides historical context. It builds character. It forms citizens. It fires the imagination.

It isn’t just the future of North Carolina’s economy that is at stake here, then. Better education will strengthen our relationships, our communities, our culture, and our democracy.

Easier said than done, of course. Progressives and conservatives tend to emphasize very different school reforms. That often leads one side to claim that the other side doesn’t really share the goal of better education. I think such claims are profoundly mistaken and actively obstruct both policy debate and educational improvement.

As a conservative, I have long championed choice, competition, and rigorous standards as essential to boosting education in North Carolina. I believe these principles, well-established as important in other fields of endeavor, apply well to education. I also read the available empirical evidence as suggesting that choice, competition, and rigorous standards tend to make students better off, although the research findings are hardly unanimous and some of the effect sizes, while statistically significant, aren’t very big.

For example, the journal Education Finance & Policy just published a paper by two researchers, Anna Egalite of North Carolina State University and Jonathan Mills of the University of Arkansas, that examined what happened when Louisiana instituted a scholarship program for students attending private schools in that state. Egalite and Mills concluded that the resulting competitive pressure tended to have positive effects on student performance in Louisiana’s district-run public schools, although the effects were small and confined only to math.

I’ll take those gains, however — because my further reading of the evidence is that nearly all education reforms have relatively modest effects by themselves, particularly when they are evaluated shortly after introduction and have not really been implemented to scale.

I support school choice and related reforms even as I also support direct measures to enhance public-school performance such as offering better recruitment, training, and incentives to school principals and giving great educators more ways to expand their impact — and earn higher salaries — through advanced teaching roles. There’s no inconsistency here. Education is a complex enterprise. There’s unlikely to be one single policy, teaching style, or school design that works best for every educator, student, and family in every community.

Add up many marginal or moderate gains and you end up with big gains. That’s the practical approach. Just as the cause of school reform isn’t advanced by demonizing opponents, it’s also not enhanced by catastrophizing the issue. While we can and should do much better, North Carolina’s public schools are already among the most effective in America. Adjusted for student demographics, North Carolina’s eighth-graders ranked third in the nation in math and 11th in reading on the most-recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. That fact shouldn’t make us complacent. But it should make reformers less likely to panic or fume if they don’t immediately get their way.

One lesson we ought to impart to future generations of North Carolinians is that we can argue such issues in good faith, without impugning the motives of others.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Here are three true statements, as best I can determine. First, Americans of all backgrounds have experienced gigantic declines in poverty over the past two generations. Second, most diversity training is worse than a waste of time. Third, police officers are no more likely to kill minorities than they are to kill whites during traffic stops or arrests.

Surprised? I don’t blame you. These statements are difficult to square with establishment opinion. That doesn’t make my statements false, however. It simply makes them inconvenient.

I’ll back up each statement in a moment. But to cut to the chase: What should you do when you’re convinced your political opponents are wrong? In my opinion, that is the key question we face in our present moment, not how best to address issues of mobility, equality, and justice.

Let’s begin with poverty. The standard measures are way out-of-kilter with reality. They exclude much of what lower-income households actually receive to live on, such as refundable tax credits, nutrition assistance, housing, and Medicaid. They also fail to account properly for inflation.

When correctly measured, poverty has fallen dramatically — from 30% of Americans in 1960 to 13% in 1980, 6% in 2000, and less than 3% today, according to a long-running calculation by the University of Chicago’s Bruce Mayer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan. Average poverty rates are down among all age and demographic groups. And even if you think Mayer and Sullivan’s poverty threshold is set too low, that doesn’t change the trend line. Poverty has plummeted.

Now let’s look at diversity training. It’s been around in more-or-less its current form since the 1980s. Hundreds of studies later, it’s safe to say that most diversity training either produces no long-term benefits for the companies, universities, or other institutions employing it or actively damages relationships among participating coworkers.

Alas, it isn’t even in the case that the quality of the training has gotten better with time. Much of today’s training is based on the use of implicit bias tests, which are at best crude measures of not-well-defined phenomena. “Training to combat implicit bias has no demonstrable benefit,” observes Columbia University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, “and may be even be counterproductive with respect to changing behaviors.”

Finally, I’ll explain my point about fatal shootings by police officers. On average, about a thousand American die every year at the hands of law enforcement. The vast majority are armed and dangerous, of course, although we know from recent tragedies that some are neither. Among those whose race or ethnicity is known, 51% of those killed by police since 2015 were white, while 27% were black and 19% Hispanic.

Because blacks and Hispanics make up smaller shares of the population, they are disproportionately more likely to die in this way. But that’s not the same as saying police officers are more likely to shoot them than they are whites in similar circumstances. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely to be stopped, questioned, or arrested. When Harvard economist Roland Fryer ran the numbers on fatal incidents, he found “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”

Knowing what I think I know about poverty, diversity training, and police shootings, then, should I feel empowered to taunt, ridicule, or savage those with contrary views? No. For one thing, these statements are factual but don’t tell the whole story. Why are blacks and Hispanics stopped more often by police, for example? Both differences in crime rates and unjust racial profiling are likely at play. Through informed debate, we can all grope to more empirically supportable — and probably more complex — explanations than the conventional wisdom offers.

More importantly, these statements are true as best I can determine. If I ever hope to persuade others I’m right, I must accept the possibility that someone will persuade me I’m wrong. It’s a two-way street. And the only one worth traveling in a free, open, and civil society.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

If the primary purpose of public education was to prepare young people for jobs, its entitlement to taxpayer support would be far weaker.

I don’t say that because preparing young people for employment is unimportant. It is of great importance. Precisely because effective education and training would boost the future incomes of students, however, private money would flow into the enterprise — from parents, future employers, and (in later grades) the students themselves. They’d all get direct economic returns on their investments.

Governments would subsidize the schooling of the poor, to be sure, as a kind of safety net. But that wouldn’t necessarily lead to universal provision or subsidy of public education. Its primary purpose is really about culture, not economics. It is to produce future citizens who are inclined to self-government, and capable of it.

When voting or otherwise participating in representative government, citizens should possess enough general knowledge to ask informed questions and cast informed ballots. And when engaged in direct democracy — voting on ballot referenda, for example, or attending a town meeting — an informed citizenry is even more critical. “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote. “They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

Educating young people for citizenship means imparting a broad knowledge of diverse subjects. They should be able to read and consider news and information. They should possess a working grasp of math and science. And perhaps most importantly, they should know their country’s history and understand the civic institutions in which they will participate.

Alas, when it comes to history and civics education, North Carolina seems determined to blow it. As my John Locke Foundation colleague Terry Stoops recently explained, state officials began a revision of North Carolina’s social-studies standards in 2019. Over the next year, the process devolved into a politicized mess, producing standards that are heavy on leftist nomenclature and light on specificity, rigor, and balance.

A national group called the Thomas B. Fordham Institute noticed. In a newly released report evaluating history and civics standards across all 50 states, Fordham placed North Carolina near the bottom of the list, with a D minus for our new civics standards and an F in history.

“North Carolina’s new civics and U.S. History standards are inadequate,” the report states. “Nebulous verbiage and an aversion to specifics make them functionally contentless in many places, and organization is poor throughout. A complete revision is recommended before implementation.”

Naturally, defenders of North Carolina’s new standards will cry foul, given the Fordham Institute’s past advocacy of standards-based reform and school choice. This is not about partisan politics or disagreements about education policy, however. Here are the five states Fordham put at the top of its list: Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and New York. There’s no “red state vs. blue state” pattern here, just as there is no such pattern among the 10 receiving F-grades in both categories.

Although North Carolina just missed dropping into that bottom tier, it has the worst history and civics standards in the Southeast. Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Mississippi all got “exemplary” or “good” ratings.

How can state policymakers rectify this mistake? Stoops urges an immediate halt to the implementation of North Carolina’s new standards pending a complete rewrite. The Fordham Institute team has offered specific recommendations to improve the standards. In civics, for example, the state should lay out in detail what students should learn about such essential topics as the separation of powers, judicial review, the rule of law, and the electoral process. Fordham also offered thoughtful ways of aligning the civics and history standards with each other.

North Carolina should “articulate what students should know instead of asking them to ‘exemplify,’ ‘critique,’ ‘distinguish,’ ‘differentiate,’ ‘compare,’ ‘assess,’ or ‘classify’ massive bodies of unspecified content that cannot or should not be handled in those ways,” the report concludes.

In this case, where Tennessee and California lead, North Carolina should follow.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Did Fagin’s pickpockets stimulate the economy of London?

If you’ve read Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist or seen the musical derived from it, you’ll immediately recognize the name. Fagin is the rogue who takes in orphans and runaways, trains them to pick pockets and swindle marks, and then distributes the proceeds between himself and street tough Bill Sikes.

In the novel, Fagin is clearly villainous. In the musical, however, he has some redeeming qualities and is played with more humor than menace. In one of the show’s catchiest songs, he and the other boys explain to Oliver that, “In this life, one thing counts/In the bank, large amounts/I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees/You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.”

Fagin trains his thieves to go after wealthy people whose wallets, watches, and other easily pilfered items will bring the most value. And he celebrates the black-market nature of the enterprise: “Why should we break our backs/Stupidly paying tax?/Better get some untaxed income/Better to pick-a-pocket or two.”

Few readers would see Fagin’s exploits as portrayed in the story as anything but socially destructive (not to mention sinful). To take money out of someone else’s pocket and put it in your own creates no value. You benefit at the direct expense of your victim, who receives nothing in exchange for the good or service he produced to earn his money.

Moreover, most readers wouldn’t feel much better about Fagin’s scheme if he distributed the lucre in a more egalitarian fashion — by buying better food and clothing for the Artful Dodger and his pals, for example. It would still be stealing. It would still be both morally wrong and injurious to society as a whole.

But when talking about how governments can affect the course of economies, far too many politicians and political commentators resort exactly to the kind of rationalizations that Fagin might concoct. They advance programs that, in effect, take money from the taxpayer’s left pocket and return some of it (after subtracting government’s shipping and handling charges) to the taxpayer’s right pocket. Then they expect gratitude.

Or they advance programs that take money from the pockets of richer people in order to fill the pockets of poorer people, arguing that because poorer people aren’t likely to save anything, the economy will benefit from all the extra consumer spending. But unless the rightful possessors of the money were planning to bury it in the ground or hide it in their mattresses, this is a silly claim. Money saved in bank accounts or securities becomes capital invested in new tools, machinery, factories, job skills, or ideas. It is akin to seeds planted in the ground for future harvest rather than seeds tossed into the ocean or desperately eaten for sustenance.

This analytical error is not only present among liberals. Some conservatives defend tax cuts by arguing that they stimulate the economy through putting money in people’s pockets to spend. But if the taxes weren’t cut, that money would be found in other people’s pockets — those of public employees, government vendors, and program beneficiaries — where it would also be spent. The real economic reason to keep taxes as low as possible is that private households and businesses tend to spend their money more wisely, on highly valued consumer goods and on highly productive capital goods, than the government can spend it on their behalf.

To the extent you limit government to its proper size and scope, you maximize efficiency and give highly productive people a good reason to live, work, shop, invest, and create jobs in your neck of the woods, which generally works to your advantage as well as theirs. Voluntary exchange is a positive-sum game. Forced redistribution is a zero-sum game.

So, no, London was not a more economically developed place because of Fagin and his footpads. It was a poorer one. Truly combating poverty means improving education, strengthening families, and encouraging the entrepreneurship that leads to job creation and income growth. It doesn’t mean substituting a seemingly benign public employee for the rascally Fagin and expecting macroeconomic magic.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Although the politicians in Washington almost never talk about the issue anymore, our entitlement programs are on a collision course with fiscal reality.

Let’s zero in on Social Security. Its “trust fund,” which consists entirely of debt the federal government has issued to itself, will be exhausted in a decade or so. As a practical matter, this isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Social Security is already running a cash deficit — more payments going out than payroll taxes coming in. To cover the difference, the federal government draws from its trust fund of federal bonds.

In other words, it draws from its general revenues to pay Social Security benefits. If the trust fund didn’t exist, Washington would . . . draw from its general revenues to pay Social Security benefits.

Nevertheless, as a legal matter, the coming exhaustion of the trust fund will trigger a crisis. Let’s say it happens in 2032. At that point, federal law will require that Social Security benefits be lowered across-the-board until they can be financed entirely by payroll taxes. That would be an immediate 21% cut.

And it’s not going to happen. That much is obvious. No president or member of Congress could withstand the blowback. They’ll either raise the payroll tax rate, eliminate the current cap on income to which the tax is applied, or make more-complex changes in benefits to shield lower-income recipient from anything like a 21% hit.

Or perhaps they’ll change the law to run larger deficits. But that will only postpone the fiscal reckoning a bit. Federal debt is not a perpetual-motion machine, much as some political activists might want it to be. Servicing it will require some combination of tax increases and reductions in spending — either enacted directly or applied indirectly through a renewed and rampant inflation.

Now, if you’ve been thinking about Social Security’s unfunded liabilities at all, you probably have a preferred solution. I happen to think the best solution at this point is to apply a means test to benefits, making the program more explicitly a redistributive safety net rather than pretending it can or should be the centerpiece of household savings for retirement.

But whatever we do — general tax hikes, subjecting upper-income households to more payroll tax, raising the retirement age, changing the inflation calculator to reduce benefit growth over time, etc. — we need to get on with it. The longer we wait, the costlier the intervention will be.

That’s the main conclusion of a new National Bureau of Economic Research paper. The authors — John Shoven and John Watson, both of Stanford University, and Sita Nataraj Slavov of the American Enterprise Institute — didn’t just look at estimates of the effects of various reforms on Social Security’s structural deficit. They also examined the costs of political dithering about reform.

“Knowing in advance which reform will be implemented allows for better planning and therefore has value,” they wrote. “The government could resolve that indecision by deciding today what steps it will take to close Social Security’s shortfall.”

If Americans are informed ahead of time that, say, their benefits are going to be reduced, or the age they can retire with full benefits is going to be raised, they have time to react. If they aren’t informed ahead of time, the study found, that could cost them many thousands of dollars.

I know why Democrats and Republicans alike don’t want to talk about this. Each of the practical options for bring Social Security costs in line with revenues will make a large bloc of voters angry. Twenty years ago, when there was some momentum in Washington to construct a bipartisan solution, politicians could have made virtually all of the benefit changes prospective, affecting only future retirees, and given people lots of time to accumulate savings in personal accounts. It is, however, too late now to engineer a soft landing.

It was a missed opportunity, a failure of political leadership and imagination. And, alas, a costly one.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

“I see you’ve written another book. What’s this one about?”

“It’s called Mountain Folk. It’s a historical-fantasy novel set partly in North Carolina during the Revolutionary War.”

“It’s a what?”

I’ve had some version of this conversation many times in recent months. Having spent most of my journalism career writing about government and politics, and authoring books of economic and political history, people assume any new project of mine would fall into the same category.

When they learn I’ve written a novel — and particularly when they discover it doesn’t just have an historical theme but also includes dwarfs, elves, magic, and monsters — they grow concerned. Am I having a midlife crisis, or indulging some childhood whim?

Not at all. While I greatly enjoyed writing Mountain Folk, and hope that my readers will enjoy it as a rollicking tale of frontier life and high adventure, I admit there is more than just simple escapism going on. Perhaps it’s just because I was in the 4-H Club growing up, but I believe I can summarize my reasons for writing the novel in four words: History, Heroes, Heritage, and Humanity.

First, I hope to encourage a greater understanding of and appreciation for our country’s history. According to one recent survey, only a third of Americans possess enough historical knowledge to pass the U.S. citizenship test. Most can’t say which countries were on which sides in World War II, or why Americans declared their independence from the British empire.

Second, I want to rescue, refresh, and expand the concept of American heroism. Yes, historical figures such as George Washington, Daniel Boone, and Abraham Lincoln were imperfect in real life. We should come to know as much as we can about them, warts and all.

But we can and should still admire the important contributions these old-school folk heroes made to the growth and development of our country, even as we properly integrate a broader variety of tales into the story of America. In Mountain Folk, one of the main characters is a Cherokee heroine named Nanyehi who as a young woman led her people to victory in battle but later in life became a legendary peacemaker.

Third, I use elements of history and folklore to explore what it really means to be an American. Our country is different from most others in a key respect: we do not share a common ethnic heritage. During centuries of migration — some voluntary, in search of a better life, and some involuntary, the consequences of removal or the slave trade — America has become a dynamic, sprawling, sometimes-brawling society encompassing many different peoples, religions, values, and cultures.

The resulting diversity can be vibrant and powerful. But Americans still require a common creed to unify us, and a common set of institutions to convert abstract principles into practical governance. Freedom is central to that common creed, or so I argue in the pages of Mountain Folk.

Finally, although my novel has many non-human characters, I actually use them to illustrate the inescapable realities of human nature. We are all fallen creatures. We yield to temptation. We make mistakes. Even the best of us, if entrusted with great power, may end up abusing it, insisting all along that our noble ends justify ignoble means.

“We always have a choice — a choice whether truly to live according to our principles, or simply to survive by abandoning them,” one of my fairy characters says towards the end of the book. “With that freedom to choose comes the responsibility to accept the consequences. I accept mine. I will not submit. I will not be complicit to tyranny. If that robs me of my home forever, so be it.”

Now, Mountain Folk is hardly a history textbook or a philosophical treatise. There are heroes, villains, thrilling rescues, and epic battles. Daniel Boone even fights a giant, fire-spitting salamander! But there’s a serious purpose underneath — a fact that should come as no surprise to longtime readers of this column.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I once found a $20 bill on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C. I picked it up, thus ruining the punchline of an old joke.

Two economists are walking along when one points to a $20 bill. The other shakes his head. “That’s not really there, because if it were someone would already have picked it up.” They keep walking.

The joke works on two levels. For certain advocates of the “efficient markets” hypothesis, which argues that professional money managers can’t outperform market averages over time, the joke satirizes the idea that any chance of making an extra $20 is always snapped up quickly by “the market.”

Regarding public policy, critics tell some version of this joke to ridicule what they understand advocates of free enterprise to be asserting: that markets always produce the best-possible outcomes. No government intervention is required because markets are, in effect, perfect without it.

This is a silly caricature of what most free-marketeers actually believe, however. We recognize that markets are highly imperfect — as are all human institutions. They are imperfect because human beings are imperfect. We have biases. We make mistakes. We yield to temptations.

The real reason to be skeptical of government “fixes” is that the actual human beings who craft and carry out public policies are themselves biased and fallible. Markets do not render perfect outcomes, but attempts to second-guess them often result in government failure.

I think debates about the minimum wage represent a telling case. Over the decades, I have heard many advocates claim that businesses themselves will be better off if government raises the minimum wage. Why? Because if businesses paid much higher wages, that would reduce turnover and make their employees more productive.

Responding to this argument does not require me to insist that all businesses are currently paying all their workers the “right” amount of money. I am willing to grant that some employers could make themselves better off by paying their employees more. What I am not willing to grant is that most employers are so uninformed, so foolish, or so inattentive to maximizing their profits. Minimum-wage advocates are essentially suggesting that the sidewalks of the labor market are blanketed with $20 bills that these uninformed, foolish, inattentive employers refuse to pick up.

If you truly believe that, why waste time arguing with me? You should go pocket those piles of cash. Not only would you personally benefit, but you’d also improve the lives of all those oppressed workers.

Of course markets aren’t perfect. They also bear little resemblance to the economists-on-the-sidewalk joke. Markets are in constant motion. The closer we get to them, the more details we can pick out — but even then our knowledge is constrained.

The reason most industries with lesser-skilled workers don’t already pay $15 an hour is that they see details the politicians and political activists can’t see. They know some of their youngest, least-skilled workers don’t generate anywhere close to $15 an hour in output. If forced to pay them more than their labor is worth, some businesses will let them go. Others will respond by adjusting hours, non-wage benefits, and working conditions in ways that many employees won’t like. Still others will raise consumer prices to offset their higher payrolls.

There are, in other words, real costs associated with picking up “free” $20 bills.

By the way, that $20 bill I saw in Washington was near the front door of a restaurant. I picked up it, took it inside, and left it with the manager, assuming that one of his patrons had accidently dropped it on the way out and might come back to claim it.

Why not pocket it? Because I want to live in a world where dropped cash gets returned to its rightful owner. In a free society, we need not accept any current state of affairs. We always have the power to act to make it better. But that doesn’t require we force our preferences on others.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

As a fiscal conservative who thinks government is generally too large and taxes too high, I am grateful for the gas tax.

You should be, too. When Oregon instituted the first state tax on motor fuels in 1919, and North Carolina followed suit two years later, their leaders were solving a longstanding problem. Toll roads had been around for decades but struggled to cover their costs, in part because of rampant toll evasion. With automobile ownership surging — North Carolina registered some 127,000 vehicles in 1920 — state lawmakers could see the practical impossibility of accommodating the new traffic with roads funded by tolling.

So they had two choices. They could satisfy public demand for a massive road network by raising property taxes or some other generally applied tax. Or they could charge drivers themselves, by taxing the fuels their vehicles consumed. The latter option wasn’t a direct charge for using specific roads, like a toll. But unlike widespread tolling, widespread gas taxation was feasible and enforceable.

Creating a financial link, however imperfect, between using roads and paying for them allowed states to make a big investment with a very big return. During the 1920s, North Carolina’s paved road mileage exploded by 92%. The commercial and social life of our state was radically transformed.

“Far from being the beneficiaries of unwarranted government intervention in free enterprise,” I wrote in my 2012 book Our Best Foot Forward, “private automobiles were a market-friendly development that made roads a far more valuable asset. There was no need for government to manufacture an insatiable public appetite for automobiles. It came naturally.”

It’s important to remember that most transportation assets and expenditures are privately owned and financed. Although North Carolina governments spend billions of dollars a year building, maintaining, and policing our roads and streets, North Carolinians spend vastly more money every year buying, maintaining, and insuring the vehicles that travel those roads and streets.

Here’s what the numbers look like for the United States as a whole. Governments spent about $235 billion in 2018 on roads and streets. That year, households spent $1.3 trillion on the cars and trucks they drive on those roads and streets — a figure that doesn’t even include commercial vehicles. (You’ll find similar proportions elsewhere. The cost of building and operating airplanes is several times that of building and operating airports. Ditto for seaports. The only transportation sector where government is the predominate spender is “mass” transit.)

Although taxing motor fuels worked reasonably well for decades as a rough proxy for a user fee, its practicality is fading. As vehicles become more fuel-efficient (a good thing), the amount motorists pay per mile traveled for road upkeep declines (not a good thing). Taxing fuels per gallon also doesn’t keep up with inflation, and obviously won’t work as electric cars grow as a share of the vehicle fleet. Meanwhile, other revenue tools the state employs to make up the difference, as such as the highway use tax (essentially a sales tax on auto sales), have their own inefficiencies and inequities.

In a new report for the John Locke Foundation, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute argued that North Carolina should start preparing to phase out the gas tax in favor of a mileage-based user fee, combined with electronic tolling of some limited-access highways. “Mileage-based fees are more equitable than fuel taxes and the highway user tax,” O’Toole wrote, “because they charge people for what they actually use, not for what they potentially use.”

There are understandable objections to such a proposal. Will politicians really get rid of gas taxes, or will they try to add mileage-based user fees on top of them? Will politicians continue to raid the user fees motorists pay to finance programs other than roads?

North Carolina needs to get this right. The technology to pay for roads this way wasn’t available in 1921. Now it is. With the proper safeguards, we can refresh the user-pay principle for the 21st century.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

With negotiators for the North Carolina House and Senate confirming that they’ve agreed on the broad outlines of a state budget for next year, the prospect of ending the state’s 2.5% corporate income tax is one step closer to becoming reality. A phase-out is already in the Senate’s budget plan, and key House members have endorsed the idea.

North Carolina consumers should be cheering that prospect, because the corporate-income tax makes many goods and services they buy more expensive.

Taxing corporate income has always been a convoluted, unfair, and inefficient way to raise government revenue. Don’t be fooled by the label. A “corporation” is simply a bundle of contracts among individuals — investors, lenders, executives, workers, vendors, and consumers. Only people pay taxes. Legal abstractions can’t.

Policymakers have always recognized this basic fact. In the American context, corporate taxes were first instituted in the late 19th century as an attempt to tax the incomes of wealthy households, who owned the vast majority of corporate stocks and were thus presumed to shoulder virtually all the cost of a “corporate” tax in the form of lower dividends and capital gains.

Why not tax the wealthy directly? It wasn’t yet legal for the federal government to do so, and most states also lacked personal-income taxes. After rewriting constitutions to rectify that, however, most policymakers didn’t replace their corporate taxes with personal ones. They kept both on the books.

The notion that only corporate shareholders bore the true cost of “corporate” taxes was somewhat more plausible at first, when investors tended to focus on business opportunities close to home. But as capital began to flow more freely across state and national boundaries, shareholders found that they could get a higher after-tax return on their funds in places with lower corporate taxes.

Other parties to the corporate bundle of contracts found themselves less able to avoid higher-tax jurisdictions. It’s very costly for workers to relocate for another job. And not all goods are sold at such a scale that consumers can buy from faraway vendors. The demand of workers for jobs and of consumers for goods can be inelastic to price, in other words, relative to the demand of investors for rate of return.

So when economists study the actual incidence of corporate taxes — rather than just looking at the party that is legally liable for the tax bill, the corporation — they try to estimate the relative proportions of shareholders getting a lower return, workers getting lower wages, and consumers paying higher prices.

When governments tax corporate incomes, all three things certainly occur to some extent. But progressives typically assert that shareholders bear three-quarters or more of the cost. That’s hard to square with the empirical evidence, as the Tax Foundation economist Stephen Entin observed back in 2017. Shareholders almost certainly bear less than half of the cost of corporate taxes, and Entin believes the true proportion is about 30%. A more-recent study by three French scholars puts the investor share at 25%.

The remaining corporate-tax burden doesn’t just consist of workers earning lower wages (which happens in part because of lower corporate investment in productivity-enhancing capital goods). It also consists of (mostly) workers, acting as consumers, paying more than they otherwise would for goods and services.

Another recently released paper demonstrate that latter effect. An April 2020 study by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and City University of Hong Kong found that “approximately 31% of corporate tax incidence falls on consumers, suggesting that models used by policymakers significantly underestimate the incidence of corporate taxes on consumers.”

North Carolina has been steadily reducing its corporate tax rate for nearly a decade now. At 2.5%, it has the lowest rate of any state that taxes corporate income. Phasing it out entirely over the next few years will generate economic benefits far greater than the apparent fiscal cost. We’ll attract more investment, creating more jobs at higher wages. And, yes, consumers will pay lower prices.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolinians are closely divided when it comes to party preference. Our state has long been one of America’s key political battlegrounds. But when it comes to managing the state’s finances, the conservatives in charge of the state legislature are in tune with prevailing public sentiment.

Those are among the findings of the John Locke Foundation’s most-recent Civitas Poll, taken in early May. Asked which parties’ candidates they will likely support in congressional and legislative races next year, likely North Carolina voters split their picks almost evenly, with only a narrow, statistically insignificant advantage for the GOP. These same voters gave Gov. Roy Cooper a 10-point edge in job approval (53% to 43%), even as they diverged on President Joe Biden (49% disapproved, 48% approved).

When it comes to fiscal matters, however, North Carolina voters exhibit a more-pronounced conservative lean. For example, the survey team asked respondents the following question: “Generally speaking, would you say you favor smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes OR larger government with higher taxes and more services?” Those favoring smaller government constituted 57% of the sample, while advocates of larger government made up 33%.

Later in the poll, respondents were asked about the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, a proposed amendment to North Carolina’s constitution that would “limit the growth of state spending to inflation plus population growth, require yearly deposits in a savings reserve or unfunded-liability reserve, return excess revenue to taxpayers, and submit tax increases to a vote of the people.” Only 22% said they were against TABOR, with 56% in favor and the rest unsure.

I think this amendment is a good idea, too. But it’s important to recognize that the Republican-led General Assembly has generally been following its provisions anyway, even though they are under no legal obligation to do so.

That’s not an argument against placing a TABOR measure in the state constitution. Future legislatures may not be so responsible. They may follow the practice of most legislatures before 2010 — increasing inflation-adjusted, per-person spending by a rapid clip, and then raising taxes to cover deficits during economic downturns.

So why point out that North Carolina is already complying with the provisions of TABOR? Because it challenges one of the arguments that progressive critics make against it, that keeping annual budget growth below a spending cap would create fiscal chaos and destroy core public services. We know it won’t, because it hasn’t.

By no means do the findings of this poll, or any other, suggest North Carolinians are doctrinaire when it comes to tax and spending questions. They are more open to targeted tax incentives for big corporations than free-market activists would like. And while they endorse fiscal conservatism in general, many voters would also say they favor higher spending on education and other programs.

These are not contradictions. They are tensions. All of us — even politicians! — are human beings. That means that we all have goals and desires that can be in tension with each other.

Many of us wish to lose weight, for example, and try to stick to a diet. Then someone offers us a wonderful treat and we make an exception “just this once” (but not really just once). Or we construct a household budget that, if strictly adhered to, will allow us to take a long family vacation, buy a new house, or increase our savings for retirement. And then we don’t adhere to it as strictly as we planned.

Because all of us share this quirk of human nature, we create institutions to limit the potential damage of yielding to “exceptional” temptations. In state government, we divide power between a House and Senate. We give governors a veto. We divide executive authority among several officeholders, including a state auditor to scrutinize the budget. We require a vote of the people to issue general-obligation debt.

Most North Carolinians favor adding another check against excessive spending: a Taxpayer Bill of Rights. They’re just being conservative. Good for them.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

For all the suffering and damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s at least one silver lining: the experience may alter our health care system for the better.

North Carolina is among many jurisdictions that adjusted its policies so medical providers could effectively respond to the crisis. The federal government changed its rules to allow more Medicare coverage of telemedicine services. Our state lifted a ban on out-of-state providers offering telemedicine, and also relaxed certificate-of-need restrictions so hospitals could add beds, ambulatory surgical centers could act as emergency hospitals, and a range of providers could buy more equipment.

The worst of the COVID crisis is over, thank God. (And thanks to our top-notch pharmaceutical industry.) As lawmakers consider the longer-term consequences and implications, they ought to consider making their temporary policy responses into permanent policy reforms.

Ask North Carolinians who did a telemedicine visit at some point over the last year. While some had a poor experience — and of course there are many doctor visits and medical procedures that can only performed in person — most telehealth patients say they are satisfied with the care and insights they received.

Similarly, to the extent medical providers exercised their enhanced flexibility, were patients harmed? Did offering more services in more places make health care less responsive and more expensive? In the main, no.

Improving access to health care is about more than who pays the bill. It’s about options. It’s about price and quality. It’s about the size of that bill, in other words, and who possesses both the information and the incentives to make decisions about it.

As American Enterprise Institute fellow Bret Swanson observes, a lack of innovation in the delivery of medical services is a key reason why American productivity isn’t going up as fast as it once did. The health-care sector is rapidly approaching 20% of the nation’s total gross domestic product. And it is notoriously bureaucratic and hidebound.

Here’s another way to think about the problem. Since 2000, average consumer prices have gone up by 54%. That average is, however, the result of a very large spread. The prices of high-tech products such as phones, computers, and smart TVs have plunged — by 80% or more in some cases. Cars, clothes, and furniture have also experienced lower-than-average inflation.

Hospital services, on the other hand, cost about 200% more today than they did two decades ago. And, no, hospital care is not 200% more pleasant, comfortable, or efficacious.

The late economist William Baumol observed long ago that productivity gains may be inherently more difficult to achieve in sectors such as health care, education, and the performing arts because introducing technological innovation doesn’t just increase output per worker. It also alters the actual service being delivered — and not for the better.

Baumol famously offered the example of symphonic music. Assembling, staging, and compensating a full orchestra is an expensive undertaking and reaches an inherently limited audience. You can reach a vastly larger audience by recording the orchestra’s performance and selling it. But listening to an audio file is just not the same thing as experiencing a live orchestra.

Point taken. But, of course, most of us still listen to most of our music in the form of recordings. We happily take the tradeoff, because if we can only listen live, our access to music would be severely curtailed.

Similarly, while an in-person visit to the doctor has features that a telehealth visit can’t duplicate, the difference isn’t infinitely valuable. For some routine check-ins and minor afflictions, an online or video consultation is sufficient. By permanently changing our financing and regulatory policies to accommodate that, we save scarce resources for redeployment to other medical services — or to other goods and services — which confer greater consumer benefits per dollar spent.

I wish North Carolina had already liberalized its health-care regulations years ago. Naturally, I wish it hadn’t taken a deadly pandemic to break the logjam. But broken it is. And it shouldn’t be rebuilt.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The latest estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show about 251,000 North Carolinians unemployed as of April, down about 58,000 since the beginning of 2021.

Alas, the news about our labor market isn’t as good as you might think. Of those 58,000 fewer unemployed North Carolinians, some 31,000 actually found jobs. The remaining 27,000 stopped looking. Our state’s labor-force participation rate has steadily dropped over the first four months of the year.

Here’s another way to think about the trends. North Carolina’s “headline” unemployment rate is 5%. If those 27,000 were still counted in the labor force, jobless but actively looking for work, our unemployment rate would be 5.5%.

The unemployment data I’ve cited so far come from a monthly survey of a bit over a thousand households in North Carolina, with comparable samples sizes in other states. Another, broader set of data come from surveys of establishments — businesses, nonprofits, and governments — and is a more-reliable way to count jobs. Its findings are no more comforting: total employment is up about 24,000 jobs so far this year. In other words, either a big chunk or most of North Carolina’s apparent decline in unemployment is due to people dropping out of the labor force, not to people finding jobs.

There is nothing deceptive or improper going on here. This is the way changes in the labor market has been measured for decades. Politicians, journalists, and policy analysts should always interpret such changes carefully. Given the widely reported fact that many employers are struggling to fill open positions, the statistics suggest we need to do more to restore the incentive to work.

Gov. Roy Cooper just issued an executive order requiring all current or prospective recipients of unemployment-insurance payments to comply with job-search requirements. If they don’t, they’ll lose their UI benefits. This is simply a full return to the pre-COVID rules, and a welcome one. But it won’t solve the problem on its own. Most UI recipients were already subject to the job-search rule, anyway, thanks to a previous order Cooper issued in March.

Republican lawmakers in Raleigh have come up with a stronger policy response. It takes the form of an incentive to accept a job rather than a disincentive to pass one up. According to the proposed bill, unemployed North Carolinians would get a signing bonus of $1,500 for accepting a job by June 1, and $800 if they did so sometime later in June. The money would be paid out of federal relief funds North Carolina is already slated to receive.

I’ve been in favor of changing the UI incentive structure for decades now. In the standard model, workers who become unemployed through no fault of their own can only receive weekly checks. There’s generally no way to get a lump-sum payment.

Why might lump sums be better? While UI was originally intended in part as a job-search subsidy — so that displaced workers wouldn’t have to take the first job that came along, and could spend time finding a better match for their goals and skills — in practice many workers maximize their UI payments by staying on the sidelines longer than necessary.

A job-placement bonus is a reasonable response, especially as an alternative to a more-foolish expenditure of federal funds. In past work, I’ve recommended other approaches. For example, perhaps the state could allow the unemployed to forego several weeks of UI checks in exchange for a one-time payment they can use to relocate to another city or state where job prospects are better. Or the state could allow them to withdraw a lump sum (again, smaller than the maximum benefits they would otherwise receive) to start a small business.

Naturally, we can also help North Carolinians thrive by encouraging investment in job creation as well as enhancing education and training. Those interventions will take time to work, however. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID crisis, I think a signing bonus makes a lot of sense.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

In a few weeks, New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones will join the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. She accepted a five-year contract as a professor of the practice, with the possibility of receiving tenure at a later date.

Previous Knight chairs got tenure right off the bat. Hannah-Jones didn’t. For this difference, university trustees have been accused of racism, sexism, infringing on academic freedom, and engaging in “cancel culture.”

I have strong disagreements with Nikole Hannah-Jones on a wide range of political issues. As both a conservative and a Hussman School alumnus, however, I would defend her if I thought her failure to receive immediate tenure was the product of viewpoint discrimination.

But that’s not what happened, as best I can determine.

As the Raleigh News & Observer has correctly reported — in sharp contrast to the mistaken reporting of other state and national media outlets — UNC did not offer Hannah-Jones a tenured position in April, then revoke the offer after external criticism from the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (an organization I helped found and for which I serve as vice-chairman).

Rather, back in January, before her potential role at UNC was public knowledge, the provost submitted a package of faculty appointments to the UNC-CH Board of Trustees for approval. Included was a proposal to offer Hannah-Jones a tenured position at Hussman.

Trustee Chuck Duckett, who chairs the relevant board committee, replied with questions about Hannah-Jones. Other tenured appointments were approved. The board never voted on hers one way or the other. Instead, UNC converted its offer into a five-year contract and offered it to Hannah-Jones, who accepted it.

What concerns did Duckett and presumably other trustees have about giving Hannah-Jones immediate tenure? This is a personnel matter about which they are not sharing details, at least not on the record. Board chairman Richard Stevens told the N&O that because tenure is a “lifetime position,” it’s not unusual to have “questions or clarifications about background, particularly candidates that don’t come from a traditional academic-type background.”

Champions of Hannah-Jones allege the Republican-appointed trustees hesitated because they disagreed with her politically. Again, if so that would be problematic. But I don’t buy the allegation. Here’s no news flash at all: most professors who receive tenure at UNC-Chapel Hill are politically left-of-center. If UNC trustees are applying an ideological litmus test, they’re doing a horrible job of it.

What distinguishes Hannah-Jones isn’t her politics. It’s her conduct. The problem isn’t just that her signature 1619 Project contained significant factual errors and indefensible claims. When challenged about them, she dodged, weaved, and personally smeared her critics. She later tried to “memory hole” much of this.

She and the Times also engaged in stealth edits of their work, backing away from key claims while denying they were doing so. For instance, the original version of the 1619 Project stated that it aimed “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Later, after withering criticism, the Times edited the online version to take out the phrase “understanding 1619 as our true founding.”

“I argue that 1619 is our true founding,” Hannah-Jones said in an early tweet. Later, after the edit, she tweeted that the 1619 Project “does not argue that 1619 was our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776.”

I’m not nitpicking a single instance of poor judgment or bad faith. I’m offering one example among many, including her involvement in true cancel-culture episodes at the New York Times itself.

That Hannah-Jones didn’t receive immediate tenure, and will instead be evaluated according to her future classroom performance, is no outrage. It’s a wise precaution that resulted from the UNC Board of Trustees properly exercising its governance responsibilities.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the new novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

When it comes to our business climate and economic prospects, North Carolinians are used to receiving accolades. Let’s add another to the list. The Cato Institute just released a study of regulatory barriers facing entrepreneurs. North Carolina fared well in the analysis, ranking 12th-best in the nation.

No, we weren’t in the top-10. More on that in a bit. But first I want to underline the ways in which North Carolina policymakers have made it easier to start and grow businesses in our state.

First and foremost, our lawmakers have not set a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Few workers stay at minimum wage for long, of course, and most jobs have starting salaries well above it.

However, in industries that employ low-skilled workers, setting the minimum wage at $10 an hour or more, as some states do, requires entrepreneurs either to change their mixture of labor and capital, redesign their business altogether, transfer the financial hit to consumers as higher prices, or some combination thereof. Entrepreneurs adjust to the higher costs, yes, but not always easily. All other things being equal, they’d rather go where states don’t substitute political judgments for economic ones.

Speaking of which, North Carolina’s politicians also haven’t substituted their judgment for that of entrepreneurs when it comes to the optimal mix of wages and benefits. Some states require companies to offer paid sick leave, paid family leave, and short-term disability benefits. Our state, quite properly, does not.

I don’t mean to suggest these benefits aren’t attractive to workers. Many North Carolina employers already offer them. But a non-wage benefit isn’t a gift. It’s simply an alternative to cash for paying employees.

Because benefits are often tax-exempt, and there can be economies of scale in designing and administering them, it often makes sense for companies with many employees to offer them in lieu of cash salary. But a very general rule has exceptions. In certain situations, both employers and employees prefer to deal in cash. It’s best to leave the labor market alone to sort out mutually agreeable arrangements here.

Another, narrower area where North Carolina is especially entrepreneur-friendly is the sale of food produced at home. So-called cottage-food regulations often keep start-up businesses from selling their baked or bottled goods in competition with large-scale commercial kitchens and food processors. Our state is less guilty of that than most.

Now, ranking 12th in the nation in barriers for start-up businesses is not quite a top-10 showing. How can North Carolina improve our regulatory climate? Three policy changes would thrust our state into the top tier of states.

First, we should substantially modify or eliminate our certificate-of-need laws, which force health-care providers to get a permission slip from state regulators to buy new medical devices or add new services. State leaders have debated the CON issue for years, and even made some welcome, albeit modest, changes. It’s time to get bolder.

Similarly, North Carolina should take bolder steps to deregulate the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. It’s absurd that state government is still in the warehousing and distribution business. We should get entirely out of it and use asset sales and tax collections to offset the revenue loss to localities.

Finally, our state licenses far too many occupations and makes it far too difficult to complete the process. On average, North Carolinians pay about $396 to enter a licensed occupation. Georgians pay $317.

I’m not suggesting that raising our ranking in regulatory climate is an end in itself. Policymakers should do this so more North Carolinians can start and operate their own businesses, which will in turn give more North Carolina workers the opportunity to find meaningful work and build useful job skills.

Economic growth isn’t driven primarily by existing companies getting a little more productive every year. It’s driven by innovators with new, sometimes disruptive, ideas. Let’s invite more of them to do their thing in North Carolina.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

I’ve written a regular column for nearly 35 years. It debuted in the Spring Hope Enterprise, a Nash County weekly, in the summer of 1986 and then quickly expanded to dozens of other daily and community papers.

Over those 35 years, I’ve rarely opined on any subject other than politics and public policy. That’s my beat. I’ll stick to it for as long as my gracious editors continue to include me in their pages. But I’m making one of those rare exceptions today to note the retirement a wonderful journalist who had a profound effect on my life.

More than half a century ago, Fred Barnes began his career as a reporter for The News and Courier (now The Post and Courier) in Charleston, South Carolina. Now he has just retired from his post as a regular columnist for the Washington Examiner.

During the intervening decades, Fred covered the White House and U.S. Supreme Court for The Washington Evening Star, was a national correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and wrote the “White House Watch” column for The New Republic.

In 1995 he co-founded a magazine called The Weekly Standard that, like The New Republic in its prime, exercised an influence far out of proportion to its modest subscriber base. Some 23 years later, after the magazine folded, Fred moved over to the Washington Examiner.

While his roots lay with the written word, Fred Barnes has also excelled in the broadcast media, serving as a regular panelist on the PBS show “The McLaughlin Group” and a co-host and commentator on Fox News. You may have even seen his cameo in the sci-fi film Independence Day!

I first encountered Fred’s work in the early 1980s. A high-school teacher of mine, Wade Carpenter (another mentor to whom I’m immensely grateful), showcased several of Fred’s columns as examples of how opinion journalists can express their views effectively, based on reporting and rational argument, without demonizing their opponents.

Later, during the tail end of the Reagan administration, I moved to Washington to become a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. I’d done prior internships in the capital, but this was my first full-time job. I worked for Fred Barnes and his colleague Mort Kondracke, doing everything from calling sources and picking up documents to clipping papers and managing in-boxes. I also prepped them for “The McLaughlin Group” and accompanied them to the TV studio each week.

I continued to write my regular newspaper column, sharing drafts with Fred and soaking up his genial but pointed critiques. When I moved back to North Carolina, and shortly afterwards began my own broadcast work as a regular panelist on UNC-TV’s “North Carolina This Week,” I continued to check in with Fred and seek his guidance. During my years at the John Locke Foundation, he was a frequent speaker at our events.

Although Fred Barnes and I are both conservatives, I can’t say he influenced my political views to any great extent. My preferences for limited government, individual liberty, and free enterprise were well-established long before we met. And, indeed, I haven’t always agreed with Fred’s take on political events. That’s hardly required to be fellow conservatives or friends — or for me to owe him a great personal debt.

You see, an indispensable lesson I learned by working for Fred, and by reading and watching him over the ensuing decades, is that opinion journalism isn’t primarily about the opinions. It’s about the journalism.

Your audience ought to learn something new from you even if they never agree with you. They should encounter a new fact, see the results of a new study, or read a quote they might otherwise miss. They should, at least, come to recognize that most issues are complicated, and that political differences aren’t simply a product of the other side’s ignorance, idiocy, or villainy.

I’ve tried to heed that lesson. To the extent I’ve succeeded, it’s because I had a good teacher. Thanks, Fred Barnes, and best wishes.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

President Joe Biden wants you to believe that there is no relationship between the extra $300 a week many are receiving in enhanced unemployment-insurance benefits and the shortage of workers now manifest in stores, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses here in North Carolina and across the country.

But doesn’t paying lower-skilled workers more to stay on the sidelines than they could earn on the job make it more likely they’ll remain unemployed? “We don’t see much evidence for that,” the president said May 10 at the White House.

Biden’s claim isn’t quite as ridiculous as it may sound. During the early months of the Great Suppression last year, when Congress jacked up UI benefits by $600 a week, there seems to have been a surprisingly small effect on the jobless rate — even though some two-thirds of recipients were receiving more in UI payments than they’d likely have made by working.

How do we know that? Several scholars have since examined the data closely, exploiting differences in timing and benefit levels across states to test the effects of enhanced benefits on the willingness to work. All other things being equal, you’d expect to find such an effect. But all other things weren’t equal during 2020. So the effect was, at most, modest.

Think about what was happening last year. Lots of businesses were still shut down, or their hours and services were severely curtailed by government edict. Many Americans were afraid to stay in enclosed spaces for long, as consumers or workers. And because most schools were substantially closed to in-person instruction, many parents who might otherwise have taken jobs were forced to care for and supervise the virtual schooling of their children.

Given those adverse conditions, many workers would have stayed home, or failed to find jobs, even if their UI check had been smaller.

Democrats and progressives contend that what was true in 2020 is largely true today. That’s why they reject arguments by Republican lawmakers and governors, conservative economists, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and business owners across the country that the $300-a-week supplement needs to end now, not in September.

I’ve talked to managers who say they simply can’t get former or prospective employees to come in, at least at wages consistent with keeping their businesses afloat. My wife recently informed me that a restaurant we’ve frequented for years during beach vacations will be closed for the season because they can’t find enough kitchen and wait staff.

Anecdotes aren’t data, say left-wing activists. They dismiss the idea that the extra UI checks are creating an artificial labor shortage, even though many more businesses are now open and trying to hire, many more Americans are willing to venture out to work or shop, and more schools and day-care centers are open to mind the kids.

President Biden said what he said — but his actions say something else. While refusing to budge Monday on the benefit amount, he pledged to work with state governors to reimpose job-search requirements and enforce the fundamental rule of the program as described by the White House: “Anyone receiving UI who is offered a suitable job must take it or lose their UI benefits.”

As unprecedented and disruptive as the COVID pandemic has been, it didn’t repeal the laws of economics or the realities of human nature. As the labor market has begun to reset towards normal, the disincentive effects of enhanced UI benefits are coming into focus. It’s one reason why the April employment report showed hundreds of thousands fewer Americans getting jobs than expected, and why the March estimates were revised massively downwards.

North Carolina is among the states already taking steps to tighten the rules and shut off payments to workers who refuse to accept job offers. It’s good news that the Biden administration won’t stand in the way. Our labor-force participation rate is still much lower today than it was in February 2020. It’s time to get folks back to work.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans of Filipino descent had a median household income of just over $100,000 in 2019. The median household income of white Americans that year was about $66,000.

Based on these two facts, should we conclude that our society is pervasively biased in favor of Filipino immigrants, or of Americans whose ancestors once immigrated from the Philippines? Should we draw the same conclusion about Americans with ancestral ties to India (their median household income is $136,000), China ($85,000), or Nigeria ($69,000)?

No, we shouldn’t. That would be an exercise in bad math and faulty logic. Differences in household incomes or other measures among ethnic groups have many potential explanations. Cultures, traditions, and family structures vary. Educational levels and labor-force participation rates vary. Settlement patterns vary. Preferences vary.

If you’re with me so far, then you likely don’t agree with a key tenet of critical race theory. Pieced together in the 1980s and 1990s out of disparate strands of Marxist and postmodernist thought, critical race theory seeks to explain gaps in income, wealth, education attainment, and other measures as primarily the product of discriminatory social structures rather than individual choices.

Its parent idea, critical theory, was concocted by Marxist intellectuals of the mid-20th century in the aftermath of disillusionment with revolutionary socialism as actually practiced behind the Iron Curtain. Some scholars and activists began applying their new ideas to the judicial system, yielding critical legal studies. Others concluded that prior Marxist analysis had focused too much on class at the expense of other structures of oppression, devising critical race theory (and even more narrow and esoteric applications) not only as an approach to radical scholarship but also as a guide to radical political action.

What does all this have to do with the public-policy conversation in North Carolina? Plenty — unfortunately.

Do you believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion? So do I, at least when the terms are properly defined. Surrounding yourself with people of differing views and backgrounds is often good for you. It can make organizations and teams stronger. I also think people ought to be treated fairly, that they shouldn’t be discriminated against based on race, ethnicity, or other characteristics that have nothing to do with performing a job well. And I think it’s best to include, not exclude. Don’t you agree?

These beliefs are, alas, not what the current Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement is all about. Much of it is just critical race theory rigorously and sometimes ruthlessly applied to workplaces, government, philanthropy, and the social sector. It assumes statistical disparities must be the product of discriminatory practices and attitudes deeply embedded in our social structures. Therefore, it embraces the use of discriminatory practices and attitudes as the only proper response.

Let me explain that latter point more clearly. If disparities of outcomes are a sufficient proof of systemic racism and other forms of structural oppression, then the only way to know if the oppression has been dismantled would be for those disparities to go away. The logical goal must be an equality of results, not just an equality of opportunity. If that requires ongoing discrimination against “privileged” groups — racial and ethnic preferences in hiring, contracting, and higher education, for example — so be it.

It’s all utter nonsense. It’s based on simplistic and easily discredited analysis, and employs crude tools such as “implicit bias” tests that are both methodologically unsound and highly destructive of real human relationships.

Still, I’d pay little attention to critical race theorists if they confined their nonsense to scarcely read journals and sparsely attended classes. In a free society, we all have an equal right to be very, very wrong.

But critical race theory has now spread far beyond the cloister. Its advocates seek to transform corporate governance, our justice system, and the curriculum of our public schools. Its assumptions are incompatible with freedom, liberal education, and equality under the law. Those assumptions must be fully revealed, clearly understood, and relentlessly opposed.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

Are nurse anesthetists overpaid by 74%? Are telemarketers underpaid by 25%? If you accept the standard statistical model used to defend huge and sweeping pay raises for public schoolteachers, then you pretty much have to accept these conclusions, too. They derive from the same set of data.

If you follow education-policy debates, you’ve no doubt heard about the “teacher-pay penalty.” A 2020 study from a union-backed think tank estimated teachers make about 19% less, on average, than do other workers with similar levels of education.

This finding is true as far as it goes — but it doesn’t really go very far, as American Enterprise Institute scholars Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine demonstrate in a recent study. After all, using variables such as years of education or possession of a bachelor’s degree to adjust salary data is like using an adjustable wrench with a broken thumbscrew. It will turn some big nuts. But if it can’t be tightened, there are tasks it simply cannot accomplish.

Evaluating pay differentials is one of them. The labor market is about specifics, not broad categories. Employers don’t pay “college graduates.” They pay accountants, or musicians, or nurses, or telemarketers. And employers don’t offer standardized wage premiums for “graduate degrees.” Doctors and lawyers get paid more than historians and sociologists.

Even these rules are valid only for comparing averages across broad categories. Within most professions (teaching is a familiar exception) there is often a great deal of pay variation based on scale, specialization, and performance. Some attorneys make vastly more than others despite having spent the same three years in law school. And, indeed, a few superstar musicians and bestselling historians make much more than the average attorney.

“Standard control variables, such as years of education and experience, are simply insufficient to account for important differences across occupations,” Biggs and Richwine observe. In a previous study, the authors looked not at the quantity of education received but at the performance of college graduates on standard tests of knowledge and skills. Adjusting for test scores eliminated the supposed teacher-pay gap.

For their new paper, the authors explored a different set of data: average earnings adjusted for the specific college or university attended and the specific degree received. The disadvantage of this analysis is that a college graduate could end up working in a field not clearly related to her major, such as someone with a fine-arts degree working as a financial analyst. Still, there’s a big advantage to this model, too: it allows for more granular analysis. You can, in fact, turn the thumbscrew on the wrench. And, after all, most graduates do end up in jobs related to what they study in college.

Using this approach, the authors found that the real pay differential isn’t between those with education degrees and those without them. It’s between those with degrees in a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) discipline and without them.

Among non-STEM graduates, education majors earn about as much as other degree-holders, both at one year out of school and at 10 years out of school. Yes, education major make less than STEM graduates — but so do most other non-STEM graduates.

To accept this more-sophisticated analysis of the issue is not necessarily to conclude that teachers shouldn’t be paid more. In fact, I think an across-the-board raise is appropriate for North Carolina teachers this year, after a couple of years of pay stagnation (caused by Gov. Roy Cooper vetoing state budgets with teacher-pay raises on the grounds that they should have been larger).

But if we stop talking in misleading generalities and get down to specifics, I think the long-term policy implications are clear. North Carolina should differentiate teacher pay more than we do. We should pay a lot more for hard-to-staff positions — math and science teachers in high schools, for example — as well as for teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

As for nurse anesthetists, I think most earn every penny they get, and then some.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The problem with freedom is that other people may do things that trouble, annoy, or even anger you. In a free society, you have no authority to stop them.

Strictly speaking, that’s not a problem. It’s a solution. Throughout most of human history, much suffering has derived from a lack of freedom. One faction obtained government power, wielded it to impose its moral, social, or political values on others, and then either successfully or unsuccessfully made its imposition stick with violence or intimidation. Another faction, aggrieved, eventually obtained power of its own and then retaliated.

Abuses of power begat more abuses. Winner-take-all thinking produced many losers in a ceaseless circle of strife.

Freedom is a solution in a world of conflicting values – which is, in fact, the only world we’ve got. If you are free to worship Baal and I am free to worship God, one of us is likely to be in dire moral peril. But at least I am not also fearful of being tyrannized or killed for acting on my beliefs, and you can say the same.

Moreover, in a free society I have more than just the right to worship as I please. I also have the right to attempt to evangelize you, just as you have the right to try to sell me the full Baal-Believers benefits package, complete with free ginsu knives for ritual sacrifice (did you know they can cut through these tin cans as easily as through a ripe tomato?)

Of course, in a free society, there’s nothing that says one has to listen. Therein lies the problem. In my experience, liberty lovers fail to appreciate how difficult it is for most human beings to handle not being listened to, and to be confronted with the fact that others are doing something self-destructive or wrong but can’t be enjoined from continuing. Such psychic pain is also an inalienable facet of human nature. It can be excruciating.

Yielding to the temptation to use government coercion to make this pain go away is wrong – no less than yielding to other kinds of injurious temptations – but surely one can understand why it happens.

It has become fashionable in today’s society to attribute this behavior primarily to religious conservatives, who are typically portrayed as puritanical busybodies or hypocrites. But I find at least as much willingness among groups on the political left to use governmental coercion to impose their beliefs at the point of a gun.

They try to police speech and engage in viewpoint discrimination on public-university campuses. They seek restrictions on advertising, either because they don’t like the products being sold or because they don’t think consumers are smart enough to understand the claims being made. They claim the right to impose restrictions on wages, prices, working hours, and other conditions of employment regardless of what the parties to an employment contract may seek or think is fair. And they claim the right to force devoutly Christian bakers and florists to help them celebrate weddings or communicate messages that violate the Christians’ deepest religious convictions.

Freedom isn’t easy. It requires us to be grown-ups, to settle for living in a society in which some people, no matter how hard we try, just aren’t going to do what we say or believe what we believe. It requires hippies to respect the rights of Southern Baptists, and those with less to respect the rights of those with more, and gays to respect the rights of straights, and pacifists to respect the rights of hunters. Yes, it also means the reverse in each case. It works both ways.

Yielding to the temptation to coerce inevitably creates a more serious problem than the problem of learning to live with daily annoyances and outrages – just as yielding to a strong temptation to drink or overeat can make one feel good in the short run but cause severe harm in the long run. Guess it’s time for a new 12-step program.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

North Carolina is a popular destination for those seeking to make a new life in a new state. According to a tracking report by United Van Lines, we ranked sixth in the nation for inbound migration during 2020.

I should hasten to add, fellow Tar Heels, that we ought not to puff out our chests too much. South Carolina ranked second.

The closer you look at patterns of interstate relocation, the more complex those patterns appear. Don’t assume everyone moves towards warmer weather. Don’t assume everyone moves towards urban centers, or away from them, or to places with low housing prices, or high test scores, or where one’s preferred political party is in charge.

Plenty of people do each of these things. But America is a big country full of people with big dreams that don’t necessarily match up with the big dreams of others. Tastes vary, as does tolerance for risk. And what attracts a 70-year-old to a new state can be very different from what that same person might have found attractive at 30.

Conservatives have long argued that tax policy plays a role in attracting or repelling interstate migrants — and we’re right! Dozens of peer-reviewed academic studies have confirmed a relationship between migration and either overall tax burdens or certain tax rates.

The latest research I’ve seen was just published in the Journal of the American Taxation Association (hey, now, don’t smirk at me — my reading diet happens to range widely across journals and magazines). Kansas State University’s Amy Hageman and the University of Central Florida’s Sean Robb and Jason Schwebke examined migration data for the years 2008 through 2015.

Adjusting for a host of control variables, they found that states with lower overall tax burdens tended to attract more inbound migration. They also found a negative association between inbound migration and high income taxes, high property taxes, and high taxes on the sale of certain goods and services.

In a finding some observers may find surprising, Hageman, Robb, and Schwebke found that high property and sales taxes were more likely to discourage inbound migration than high income taxes were. Others studies have yielded different results on that question.

I wasn’t as surprised as some conservatives might be see their result. My reading of the evidence is that income taxes are especially unattractive to investors, those who own or would like to own a business, and professionals with higher-than-average incomes. There are plenty of people in those categories, naturally, and if you chase them away from your state with high income taxes, the economic losses are often broadly shared. But for other would-be movers, property taxes or even sales taxes can be a bigger turnoff. It depends on individual circumstances.

To say that taxes matter in relocation decisions is not to say that they are always, or even usually, decisive. Lots of other factors enter into the equation. Americans with a taste for smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation may also like urban amenities, or proximity to water, or proximity to family. They’re going to mix and match accordingly.

Among the top 10 states in inbound migration in 2020, for example, three were not in the Sunbelt: Idaho, South Dakota, and Oregon. The first two have no state income tax. Oregon, on the other hand, has an income tax but no state sales tax.

The migration leaders in the Southeast were South Carolina (#2), North Carolina (#6), Tennessee (#7), Alabama (#8), Florida (#9), and Arkansas (#10). Among them, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida get good scores on the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index. South Carolina, Alabama, and Arkansas get bad scores.

My point is that there is no single characteristic, amenity, or policy choice that explains why people live where they live and move where they move. All other things being equal, places with greater economic freedom tend to attract more residents. Politicians ought to act accordingly. Just don’t expect to produce miracles.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

If Californians want to make their government the monopoly payer of all medical bills, why should North Carolinians be able to tell them they can’t?

In a federal republic populated by 330 million people spread across some 3.5 million square miles of sprawling territory, we should be asking precisely this kind of fundamental question — rather than the screaming at each other across partisan and geographical divides about such public-policy issues as education, health care, public assistance, and pandemic response.

I know that’s not the way most of us are primed to think about politics any more. We see restaurants in our communities decimated by the COVID-19 crisis and ask what Congress should do about it. We run over potholes or experience spotty Internet coverage and wonder if the Biden administration’s new “infrastructure” bill will fix the problem. We worry about chronic poverty and debate various federal tax and spending policies to combat it.

This impulse to nationalize politics is inconsistent with America’s traditions. It’s unwieldy and fosters social division. I also think it’s just plain weird.

I’m not arguing for “states’ rights” or some such rot. Only individuals have rights. Governments have powers. In our federal system, the national government had certain powers listed and authorized by the Constitution, powers that only a national government can effectively perform. National defense is a familiar example. Another example is, in fact, protecting us against state and local infringements of our individual rights to life, liberty, and property (which was one reason segregationists invoking “states’ rights” back in the 1950s and 1960s was so ridiculous).

Still, the United States Constitution was never meant to guarantee all Americans the right to drive smooth roads, or to access the Internet at high speeds, or even to have one’s medical bills paid for by someone else. Perhaps those services ought to be provided by government. Perhaps not. But that’s the kind of call that should be made closer to home.

After all, all people who reside in the United States also reside in states and localities. The “federal government” is not, in reality, some separate entity that can pay for things we’d otherwise have to finance ourselves. All federal dollars are either taxed away from us in real time or borrowed from bondholders who will have to be paid by taxing away our money sometime in the future.

Yes, I know that nationalizing public policy can make the money flows more complicated. The residents of some states ending up subsidizing the residents of other states. I see this as a bug, not a feature. If Floridians want to build expensive homes, condos, or tourist attractions in the path of hurricanes, it should be up to them to cover the cost if they bet wrong, by collecting revenues from their residents and visitors. If New Yorkers or New Mexicans or, God forbid, even North Carolinians want to build commuter rail lines, why should there be any “federal funds” involved? Oregonians won’t be filling those seats. (No one will, actually, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Once we recognize federal money isn’t “free” — that North Carolina doesn’t really gain more resources to spend on infrastructure or other programs just because we send our money up to Washington and back, or borrow money now from federal bondholders and pay it back later with interest — one argument for our oversized federal government falls. I recognize there are others, however. Some people just can’t stand the idea that their values and preferences are not universally shared. And some businesses would rather comply with one set of regulations rather than 50, just as some activists would rather “win” their issue once rather than having to fight it out across state capitals.

By nationalizing policy issues to such an extreme degree, we’ve ruined our political discourse. We’ve turned every federal election into a potential catastrophe in someone’s mind. We’ve made the stakes too high. Let’s devolve, decentralize, and deescalate — before it’s too late.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.

The latest federal job report is out — and it shows North Carolina’s employment recovery stalling out a bit during the first quarter of 2021.

That may not be evident at first glance. The state’s headline unemployment rate fell during the first three months of the year, reaching 5.2% in March. That’s way down from the terrifying 13.5% rate of a year ago, as COVID-19 and the ensuing shutdowns swept North Carolinians out of their jobs at an unprecedented speed.

That headline unemployment rate of 5.2% is, however, still higher than the 3.6% unemployment rate North Carolina posted in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. More importantly, some workers without jobs aren’t counted in the “headline” rate, the technical name of which is the U-3 rate. These are folks who are too discouraged to look for a job, are otherwise detached from the job market for some reason, or who work part-time but would rather have a full-time job.

A different measure, the U-6 rate, counts all those people, too. I can’t give you the U-6 rate for the first quarter of 2021, because that particular measure lags a bit behind the others. But as of the end of 2020, some 12.4% of working-age North Carolinians were either jobless or involuntary part-timers.

There are good reasons to believe this share hasn’t fallen very much in recent months. For example, North Carolina’s labor-force participation rate — the share of the working-age population that is either employed or actively looking for jobs — fell from 60% in December to 59.5% in March.

That’s not a sign of health in our labor market. We don’t just want the U-3 rate to drop and job counts to go up a bit. To get back to something approaching normal, we need to see North Carolina’s labor-force participation rate rise back up towards the pre-COVID rate of 61.3%.

Why are so many potential workers still on the sidelines? There are several possible (and not at all contradictory) explanations.

Many economists and Republican politicians blame the expansion in unemployment-insurance benefits. During the early stage of the pandemic, Congress and the former Trump administration both expanded eligibility for UI benefits and tacked on additional money to those benefits.

Back then, when businesses were ordered to shut down or cut back hours, or simply couldn’t attract many risk-averse customers, the effects of expanded UI on work incentives may have been modest. Indeed, that was the stated purpose of the extra $600 a week — giving households money to pay their bills because so many workers had little prospect of getting any kind of full-time job.

Now that our state and many others have relaxed restrictions on businesses, and newly vaccinated customers are venturing out to consume goods and services, the wide availability of UI benefits, still supplemented by an extra $300 a week, is surely keeping some lower-skilled workers on the sidelines. They truly receive more weekly income from government than they would from an employer.

But I doubt that’s the only factor at play here. While state restrictions on our economy have been relaxed, they remain tight in some sectors. Capacity constraints are keeping arts, entertainment, leisure, and hospitality businesses from staffing up fully. Those jobs won’t come back until state restrictions are gone and until more people feel safe enough to go out.

Although the perverse incentives facing sidelined workers are largely of Washington’s making, North Carolina leaders can help our labor market heal more quickly. They can keep promoting and facilitating vaccination. And Gov. Roy Cooper should lift most of the restrictions still in place on our businesses, pointing to the rising share of North Carolinians who are immune either from vaccination or from prior exposure to COVID.

Paying people to stay home from work may make sense as a temporary expedient in the midst of an outbreak of communicable disease. But it’s not the right policy now. Subsidizing idleness is bad for individuals, bad for families, and bad for our economy.

John Hood is a Carolina Journal columnist and author of the forthcoming novel Mountain Folk, a historical fantasy set during the American Revolution.