RALEIGH — Over the past eight years, conservative lawmakers have done much to constrain the excesses, expenses, and abuses of governmental power in North Carolina. They have cut taxes, controlled spending, slashed regulations, and increased the cost-effectiveness of services by introducing more choice and competition.
Land grabs don’t enhance growth
John Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation and appears on the talk show “NC SPIN.” You can follow him @JohnHoodNC.
RALEIGH — Milton Friedman once observed that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” To be sure, spending bills or regula…
Imagine travelling from Raleigh to Charlotte in about 22 minutes; not by train, plane or car, but instead in a pod, transported through an alm…
An FBI investigation of President Donald Trump should surprise no one who has followed current events in recent years. As we learned from the …
Last Friday marked the 46th annual March for Life, an event to celebrate life and honor it as a sacred and precious gift from God. This incred…
Chapel Hill is still stunned.
Lawmakers return to Raleigh next week for the 2019 session of the North Carolina General Assembly. Pledges of harmony and bipartisan cooperati…
The recent brouhaha surrounding the Catholic schoolboys from Kentucky demonstrated the partnering of social media and journalism for the absol…
RALEIGH — The single most important issue during every legislative session is the approval or revision of North Carolina’s state budget. For t…
Candidates are lining up to run in 2020 and we’ve heard those running on a more liberal or “progressive” platform, as well as those espousing …
The request was for me to talk to an audience about how to conduct civil, meaningful and honest discussions among people with different faiths…
Last week, the world watched as President Donald Trump delivered his second State of the Union Address. In his speech, the President highlight…
RALEIGH — Friar Laurence has the best of intentions. But in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the friar’s well-intended interventions do…
RALEIGH — If the most important factor determining the welfare of workers is the growth rate of the economy, that has policy implications that…
The proposed DMV move brings to mind one of the old Three Stooges comedies, the one where one of the zany trio says, “I’ve cut this board thre…
Do you remember the TV game show Family Feud? It was good fun as one family competes with another for cash prizes, but we all know that real l…
RALEIGH — If you own it, you control it. That’s what it means to enjoy a property right, in a nutshell. It is a right safeguarded by North Car…
Why is Washington still at a standstill over border security and government funding? After trying to negotiate a bipartisan deal for weeks, Pr…
Three news stories recently addressed topics related to public education, although each one seemingly stood alone in its relevance to educatin…
2019 was only four days old when we got the announcement the U.S. Supreme Court was going to hear arguments on North Carolina’s redistricting …
RALEIGH — The average public-school district in the United States enrolls about 3,700 students, according to a recent Governing magazine analy…
While I have been traveling up and down North Carolina’s roads in search of local eateries, UNC Law School professor Gene Nichol has been trav…
If you Google the word “irony,” one of the first definitions is, “happening in the opposite way to what is expected, and typically causing wry…
With the Democrat Party assuming control of the U.S. House, an inventory of accomplishments by President Donald Trump is in order, as is a loo…
No self-respecting columnist passes up the obligatory prediction column the first week of the year. So here goes mine.
RALEIGH — As dysfunctional as Congress has become, it does manage to enact some useful bills. One of them, the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act…
What really happened to Virginia Dare, the first child of English parents born in the New World? The same Virginia Dare whom I suggested recen…
It was Christmas Eve 1914. World War I was in its early stages and trench warfare was the rule of the day. Soldiers on opposing sides could he…
One of my favorite things about the holiday season is the arrival of “The World Almanac and Book of Facts.”
As a recent patient at CMC Northeast(Atrium) for ten days, I was most impressed with the quality of care provided by doctors and other staff m…
No, your mind wasn’t playing tricks on you. It wasn’t a case of déjà vu. Last week, Washington found itself in a stand-off facing a last-minut…
Have you driven around North Carolina recently? More people have decorated with outdoor lights, blowups and festive displays than we’ve seen i…
A couple of years ago a columnist asked his readers to define the holidays using one word. He was careful to be politically correct by using …
RALEIGH — There has always been a robust political debate between advocates of free trade and advocates of manipulating the terms of trade to …
What is a good book I can give a friend?
Editor’s note: Tourism is a vital cog in the coastal economy with visitor spending in the region directly responsible for 41,000 jobs and payr…
We all have our different nighttime routines. Mine looks a little like this: eat dinner. Watch the evening news. Give my three year old son, L…
While many are fretting over the just-right Christmas present, tackling last-minute holiday details or preparing for years-end, many of North …
As a nation, we came together last week to say farewell to a beloved patriot and hero, President George H.W. Bush, the 41st President of the U…
“The real mystery after half a century,” Wyndham Robertson says, “is why life at the top of large American corporations still seems so overwhe…
RALEIGH — In the January 1953 edition of the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction, a fan of the genre from Texas, Marilyn Venable, made her …
Now that Democrats will soon control one branch of Congress, President Donald Trump is again signaling that infrastructure could be an area of…
