john hood

It is often said that one can judge the strength of a person's character by observing their behavior in the face of a moral dilemma. If that is indeed the case, the silence by Art Pope's minions at the John Locke Foundation says all we need to know about their political perversion. Kudos to Rob Schofield for calling them out.

In the final analysis, this kind of hypocrisy has emerged as the defining quality of the free-market right in North Carolina. Cowards one and all.

Making a tired and inaccurate argument:

Their regulatory excesses and fiscal imbalances have chased investment capital into low-risk, low-return securities. These policies have shattered business confidence.

It wasn't "regulatory excesses" that funneled $62 trillion into credit default swaps; it was the naive and reckless faith in the free market, as espoused by pundits like you, that led a hapless Republican Congress to throw caution to the wind and tear down the regulatory walls. And guess what? Most of those walls are still down, which is why investors are so skittish.

It’s a Republican gerrymander, pure and simple.

Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing in the direction of the Carolina Journal, where John Hood calls a spade a spade in the case of Republican redistricting shenanigans. He's a little late to the party, but has arrived nonetheless. Hood deserves full credit for taking this principled stand.

Trying to tie a ribbon on cuts to state parks:

Have you ever been to a state park in South Carolina? In virtually every case, I've paid an admission fee. I was glad to do it. For one thing, I feel responsible for paying for the costs I imposed and the benefits I received. For another thing, I know that properties primarily supported by donations and user fees are usually better-run and better-maintained than properties primarily supported by involuntary "contributions" from uninvolved taxpayers.

Aside from the (what should be) embarassing admiration of South Carolina, Hood gets several other things wrong, as well.

In case SEANC members are still unsure about which party is more concerned about them:

Hood says having more people in state jobs in North Carolina hasn’t always produced a higher level of service. “That’s why it makes sense to downsize the government workforce as part of a comprehensive strategy for closing the budget deficit,” he writes. Hood said he doesn’t “relish introducing more North Carolinians to the misfortune of unemployment.”

“There’s no doubt that reducing the government’s workforce will impose significant hardship on affected workers,” Hood writes. “In the long run, downsizing North Carolina’s government will benefit the vast majority of state residents.”

With friends like that...

Hood lays it on thick when promoting school choice:

As a longtime proponent of the cause, I think that more than doubling the share of students attending schools of choice in the next few years would have a huge and positive effect, not just on those students but on North Carolina education as a whole.

And it would draw new resources into education – human resources, mostly, those of involved parents and innovative educators and entrepreneurial philanthropists – while reducing the cost to taxpayers by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

That last sentence is a doozy. Or I should say a "whopper". Why don't we see what Pennsylvania's Auditor General has to say about that cost reduction:

Compulsively litigious not-gay Republican leader suddenly allergic to electronics:

"We cannot have an election where voters in counties where the machines are used have less confidence that their votes are being accurately counted than in counties where optical scan ballots are used," Fetzer said. "It's an incompetent situation at the State Board of Elections. We believe that they knew of problems with the calibration of these machines up to two months ago."

And you dipshits were aware of potential programming issues years ago, and went to great lengths demonstrating that "glitches" had absolutely no impact on race results, and folks who wanted optical scan/paper verification were to be ridiculed by the puppet-in-charge:

If there's one thing I admire about the Show, it's their sheer persistence. They can take any development of any kind and reframe it to suit the free-market agenda, even if it takes spinning pure fantasy. That's what John Hood did last week with his crocodile tears over the Legislature's "heavy handed" treatment of UNC-TV. The honorables demanded raw footage about Alcoa, the station complied, and John found cause for alarm.

If you thought that the prospect of a legislative committee issuing commands to a supposedly independent news organization would provoke widespread outrage and condemnation, you were wrong.