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Perhaps I should thank NC cities, and the League of Municipalities. They are creating more new Libertarians every day than I ever could!
North Carolina is only one of 7 U.S. states that allows for involuntary annexation of properties by municipalities (North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho and Kansas permit annexation without the property owner's consent; Louisiana, Illinois and Oregon allow it in more limited cases.)
As Governor, I would work to persuade the General Assembly to pass legislation to curb this assault on freedom and property.
For more background, check this informative web site: Stop NC Annexation
Global Transpark... new factories and businesses that pay no taxes and are subsidized by the taxes of businesses already working here in North Carolina. We are being played for saps, and it is time to end this wasteful and corrupting practice.
The way to attract new business, and to retain existing factories and jobs, is to create an atmosphere that is good for business. Low taxes, no burdensome regulations, and an educated and productive work force are the things that make an economy prosper.
Rent-seeking by politicians is just a way to be able to claim credit for moving taxpayers' money around.
You can read more background on the Global Transpark boondoggle.
Get the state out of the killing business!
I have little moral objection to capital punishment. Some crimes are so heinous, so outrageous, that it is hard to conclude the perpetrator deserves anything but death.
The problems with the NC system of capital punishment are three:
- Our system singles out, intentionally or not, poor people. Anyone with a real defense attorney is extremely unlikely to be executed. People are not executed for the crime of murder, but for the crime of being poor.
- New evidence, and new ways of using evidence, are revolutionizing forensics. If even a few of the prisoners now on death row can be exonerated by new evidence, we should wait to give them a chance to prove their innocence.
- Our jury selection process for capital crimes is decidedly non-random. In fact, there is a bias, a bias inconsistent with fair trials. If you are selected for the pool in a capital case, where the death penalty even might be a factor, you are asked your opinion of the death penalty. If you say you oppose it, you are excused from the jury in nearly all cases. It is not clear how this distorts our jury selection process, but it is unjust and unfair to exclude good, sensible jurors who happen to have this view.
As Governor, I would immediately impose a two-year moratorium on executions in our state, and would ask for legislation ending executions completely.
Elections are the means by which the citizens control politicians. We cannot rely on politicians and elected officials to police their own activities.
But a large proportion of the seats in the General Assembly will go uncontested this year, because of the difficulty of entering politics. The only source of independent political power in a republic is a vibrant and active middle class. Campaign finance restrictions have the effect of insulating incumbents from competition, and keeping challengers and third parties from mounting any kind of effective opposition.
I would favor a relaxation of ballot access and retention rules for 'third parties' (ie, anything other than the two state-sponsored parties). I would reduce signature requirements for 'write-in' challengers. I would also favor relaxing restrictions on campaign contributions, though keeping the disclosure requirements as they now stand.
I don't think this is a partisan issue! For more details, check this interesting article by the NC Green Party Director, Hart Matthews.
After the Kelo decision by the Supreme Court, the status of private property within municipal boundaries is ambiguous. (You can see this Washington Post story for background.
The city police might protect you from thieves trying to take your property. But if those thieves are elected city councilman, the police will be on the other side. You can learn a lot more about this issue at NC Property Rights.
To be fair, I want to give you a link to the NC League of Municipalities, where they argue that Kelo is not a concern. Well, it is not a concern to the municipalities, because they are the ones who are taking property without cause or just compensation! I would proceed on two fronts:
- The first piece of legislation I would try to persuade the General Assembly to pass would be a statute sharply limiting the use of eminent domain to public uses. (A version of this legislation was already passed by the NC House in June, 2006. But a lack of support from the Governor's office allowed the Senate to kill the legislation by taking no action.)
- Second, I would support an amendment to the state Constitution curtailing the use of eminent domain forever.
Marriage
Allow Contracts Between One Person and Any Other Consenting Person
Marriage is personal, spiritual and economic relationship, one of the most important building blocks in cementing commitment and stability between two people. On a personal level, hundreds of thousands of couples in North Carolina think of themselves as 'married', without outside endorsement. On a spiritual level, your church or other group of like-minded people are free to extend or withhold the sanction of marriage.
But only the state can extend, or forbid, the economic components of marriage by granting its endorsement to marriage's contractual elements. Access to insurance, to family benefits, power of attorney, next-of-kin relations in time of illness or death: all these have to do only with the contract of marriage.
Libertarians have traditionally championed the sanctity of contract, and the capacity of free and responsible adults to enter into enforceable contracts without state interference, and with the expectation that the state will act to recognize and enforce the terms of that contract. The purely contractual portion of marriage is no different.
I would support legislation that allows legal civil unions between same sex couples, under the same conditions that this contract is offered to female/male couples.
The point is this: no one can dictate the personal life of our citizens.
The state cannot tell churches or spiritual groups to award or withhold a sacrament or ritual of marriage. But neither can churches require that the state deny the economic benefits of the civil union contract to citizens.
It has become customary to bash public education, and the state of our educational system in general. I want to sound a positive note; there are a lot of good things happening in North Carolina education, and I would want to continue that advance, to guide continued improvement. And the path to continued improvement is to foster choice. School choice would be the central premise of the education policy of a Munger administration.
We already know that it works. Both of my sons go to public schools. Now, my wife and I could easily afford elite private schools for my sons, but the excellence of the public school choices in Raleigh make it unnecessary. My sons went to Magellan Charter School in north Raleigh, and now attend Raleigh Charter High School downtown.
Newsweek magazine, in its May 16, 2006 issue, ranked the top 1,000 high schools in the United States. NC has 4 of the top 50, 9 of the top 100, and 17 of the top 200. Let me say that again: NC has 4 times as many top high schools as you would expect if all state public education systems were equally good.
Why is NC doing so well? Choice. NC has an educational system that welcomes innovation and individual initiative. The high school my sons attend, Raleigh Charter, is ranked 9th in the U.S., among all public high schools. That's in the entire U.S., mind you: number 9 overall, among all U.S. public high schools. A group of private individuals put together a plan, formed an organization, and use public funds to run a public high school under a charter. And even though Raleigh Charter is one of the top ten high schools in the nation, its cost per student is less than half that of the average for NC high schools. Facilities costs are less, administrative costs are less, and janitorial services are either provided by the students (they take out their own trash), or by contracting out to private firms that clean the bathrooms and mop the floors. In spite of only spending 50 cents on the dollar compared to traditional state-run schools, students are still better off because they had a choice.
Now, it is true that not all charter schools are so successful, though it is also true that even the worst charter schools are no worse than the lowest-performing public schools. But think about it: what happens to a charter school that parents aren't satisfied with? It closes, because its enrollments fall below the level required to secure sufficient funding to continue. What happens to a traditional public school that parents aren't satisfied with? Nothing, because public schools are not just the last resort, they are the only resort for parents who are denied a choice.
Now, you can say that everybody has a choice. After all, there are private schools. And there is home-schooling. Both of these options have been selected more and more often in the past decade. Those choices are not enough, however. Private schools are not plentiful, and they are very expensive. Home-schooling is expensive too, in its own way, and not everyone is able to teach bright students the challenging material they need to know to succeed in the 21st century workplace.
I would argue that NC faces three fundamental problems in educating its children:
- Huge disparities in the ability of counties to provide a solid basic education;
- Low teacher pay, making it hard to attract good new teachers and even harder to keep the many excellent teachers already in the system;
- a flight of the best students, particularly those from wealthy families, from the public schools into private schools or home-schooling arrangements.
One possible solution, one I myself was opposed to, is the highly touted new 'Education Lottery.' But the lottery is a sham, a tax on poor people pursuing a dream that they will almost certainly never realize, given the odds. And it is most likely that lottery proceeds will displace existing education spending, as has been the case in other states.
Most people in government, particularly those in the state-sponsored parties, got there by making some variant of the same promise: 'Vote for me, and I will give you other peoples' money.'
My promise is a little different, when it comes to education: 'Vote for me, and I will let you keep more of your own money, money you yourself have earned.' I would offer each parent in the state of N.C. an education voucher, financed by lottery proceeds, of $1, 250 per child in their household. This voucher could only be spent at a state-accredited school, or be credited to the household in the case of home-schooling. But I would make the accreditation process streamlined and simple, fostering the growth of charter schools, religious or theme schools, or any other kind of innovative educational program that can attract the children of parents who want to exercise their choices as parents.
Importantly, I would put a floor on public school spending at its existing level. Our schools need a lot of work, a lot of physical plant improvements, and better textbooks. A voucher/choice program cannot work by starving the traditional public schools of revenue. And I don't want the General Assembly to be tempted to cut education dollars and use them for pork barrel spending in their districts, hoping lottery money will make up the difference.
What would be the effect of this voucher/choice program? In many counties, particularly in the beginning, this would simply mean that children would continue to attend the existing public schools, since there is no effective 'choice' there. But at worst this would mean that there would be large infusion of funds into those school districts, representing a more effective settlement to the issues in the Leandro court case than anyone else has proposed. And over time, private schools, charter schools, and public schools that deliver good educations at low cost would find their enrollments increasing. Ultimately, 'accreditation' would simply mean that voluntary choice of private parents resulted in enough enrollments to stay open. Schools that satisfied parents would be accredited by something like a market process: people value the service being provided enough to spend their voucher money there.
Because parents would be empowered to make a choice, many parents would investigate those choices and make the one that best suits them and their child. Because enrollments are a means of increasing school funding, students and their needs would start to count again. The public schools bureaucracy of our state seems to think it is doing us a favor by educating our children, because each child is an additional burden. Under my program, each student is a way of attracting more revenue.
NC is already doing pretty well, compared to public high schools across the nation. We have 4 times as many top-performing schools as would be predicted by an equal per-state distribution. But we can do better. And with the Munger voucher/choice program, we will do better.
The US incarcerates by far the largest proportion of its population of any country in the world, accounting for nearly one fifth of the world's prison population. That's right, we imprison more than the Soviet Union ever did.
It is no accident that the US also has chosen to criminalize the most actions of any country. We routinely hand down mandatory sentences lasting decades. On any given day in America, more than six million residents (though not all of these are citizens) are under some form of supervision of the corrections systems.
North Carolina has followed the trend in the rest of the states, with sharply increasing prison populations and dramatic expansion in the categories of criminalized behavior or activity. We have more than 37, 500 inmates in our jails, along with more than 115,000 probationers and parolees. A majority of the inmates, more than 22,000, are non-white.
Our state must strike a better balance, on two fronts:
- First, we must stop criminalizing so many behaviors that represent addictive personalities or recreational pathologies. I do not advocate the legalization of all, or even most, drugs. But I would favor decriminalizing most drug possession, and most other victimless crimes including prostitution.
- Second, we must stop spending so much of our money and effort on incarceration, and more on rehabilitation and alternative sentencing.