Plundering the government in North Carolina
Published September 26, 2024
Sen. Phil Berger is steeped in the libertarian tradition. In a strikingly erudite interview, he told Business North Carolina that the main lesson he gleaned from the writings of Frederic Bastiat was to be wary of “what the government can do to you.”
The irony is that his legislature has flipped this maxim on its head. Leading legislators seem to be asking themselves, “What can I do to the government?”
One of the signature tics of Berger’s majority has been to put greed on a pedestal. Abjuring half a century of balanced economic policy, Republican legislators have given corporate avarice pride of place in driving decisions in this state. Their reversal was outlined by intellectuals at the hyper-capitalist John Locke Foundation and encouraged by the sort of Koch Brother/Rasputin of the N.C. right, Art Pope.
The worship of the profit motive has also been underwritten by a business community that has rejected its Jim Hunt-era moderation in favor of a severe focus on business costs that reflects the philosophy of businessmen in lower-South states like South Carolina and Texas.
Republicans have institutionalized this extreme economic individualism across many policy fronts. But the centrality of greed to North Carolina conservative politics has been even more forcefully illustrated by the behavior of Republican legislators themselves.
Top Republicans have sought to skim wealth directly from North Carolina government. They seem to see no distinction between a policy framework that emphasizes the corporate desire for ill-begotten profit and a personal agenda of accumulating riches from the public purse. Conservative politicians are plundering the government.
These shenanigans have attracted the attention of investigators — an annoyance that inspired Moore to punish the critical Wake County Rep. Terrence Everitt with a viciously gerrymandered district.
One of Moore’s lieutenants, Rep. Jason Saine, has if anything been more brazen in plundering a government he claims to deplore. Saine was on unemployment benefits when Republicans appointed him to the state House in 2013. He quickly voted to cut the benefits he’d happily been receiving.
This hypocrisy aside, Saine spent much of his time in the House serving as chief author of numerous austerity budgets that starved core public services like mental health. He has now accepted a job in the mental health field where he will receive a (presumably lucrative) salary skimmed from our outrageously paltry mental health budget, which he, personally, kept at cruelly low levels. This money would otherwise go to people in desperate need, but Saine has set his eyes on it as an appetizing prize.
In the new North Carolina, government is not only a handmaiden of profit, but a profit center itself. Canny and avaricious politicians have put their adulation of corporate greed into personal practice, treating the people’s business as an opportunity to extract easy wealth from a treasury that is steadily shrinking due to one round after another of tax cuts for the rich.
Our political culture has grown profoundly ill. The vision at the heart of North Carolina is of the humble man or woman serving her neighbor without pretense, “to be rather than to seem.” In place of this homespun ideal is a pack of eager acquirers, with greed as their guiding star, plundering the spoils of a shrinking commonwealth.
Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.
