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John Hood: You Can’t Have Stability and Growth

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by John Hood

On a single day of catching up on the latest business news, I happened across five stories with a direct bearing on a key sector of North Carolina’s economy. The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported on a severe downturn in the pulpwood market, including the closure of mills, potential delays in the replanting of commercial forests, and shifts in business practices and consumer preferences that don’t auger well for the industry. The Journal also noted the pending expiration of intellectual-property protections for key pharmaceuticals, calling it “the biggest patent cliff in decades.”
Closer to home, Triangle Business Journal covered surging interest in banking mergers and acquisitions, due in part to federal regulations, and reported that North Carolina hospitals have some of the longest emergency-department visit times in the country, due in part to capacity constraints. Meanwhile, sister publication Triad Business Journal described public opposition to new data centers and its potential to crimp new investment and growth in tech companies in the region and beyond.
I wouldn’t describe this day’s collection of business stories as unique — or uniquely troubling. On the same day, these and other media outlets also reported on business expansions, new commercial and residential development, and innovative new technologies that hold great promise for customers, workers, investors, and suppliers. Modern economies are dynamic, not static. If we want the many benefits of free enterprise, we can’t also have perfectly stable markets for goods, services, and labor. It’s simply not possible.
North Carolinians should understand the tradeoff better than anyone in the country. Since the founding of what became our state more than three centuries ago, our economy has undergone a series of radical transformations.
In its early decades, North Carolina was almost entirely agrarian. Plantations dependent on slavery and indentured servitude produced tobacco in the northeast and rice in the southeast, while subsistence farmers and Indian communities reliant on corn, squash, bean, fish, and game inhabited much of the backcountry. By the time of the American Revolution, wood products had become a major industry, generating hardwood timber for homebuilding and barrel-making as well as pine tar, pitch, and turpentine for the construction of commercial and military ships.
Cotton came later, as did the damming of North Carolina’s numerous but not easily navigated rivers, which laid the foundation for furniture, textile, and apparel manufacturing. Early gold rushes in the Carolina backcountry combined with the state’s traditionally light regulation of branch banking laid the foundation of another signature sector of our future economy: financial services.
As economist Michael Walden explained in two essential books — North Carolina in the Connected Age (2008) and North Carolina Beyond the Connected Age (2017) — a strategic triad of tobacco, textiles, and furniture emerged in the early 20th century and by the 1960s represented most of our industrial output and a quarter of the state’s total employment. By the entire of the century, however, this Big Three had been eclipsed by a Big Five: technology, pharmaceuticals, financial services, food processing, and vehicle parts.
Now, quarter-way through the 21st century, all these industries continue to evolve while others emerge, often powered by artificial intelligence. If “experts” tell you they know for sure how it will all turn out, treat their prognostications the same way you do sports commentators: for entertainment purposes, if that’s your thing, but not for investment purposes.
What I think we can forecast with great confidence is that, if markets are left free to discover and spread new information, allowing producers and consumers to adjust in real time, our economy will keep growing and North Carolinians will keep reaping its benefits. Remember that, contrary to popular belief, our state is not deindustrializing. North Carolina’s total manufacturing output was higher in inflation-adjusted terms in 2025 than it was in 1997. Manufacturing of non-durable goods (such as socks) went down 15%, yes, but durables manufacturing (such as trucks) nearly doubled.
The more things change, the more the laws of economics remain the same.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

Publisher's Pen: The Best of Fayetteville starts now!

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by Bill Bowman

January 2027 marks the 31st anniversary of Up & Coming Weekly—and what an extraordinary journey it has been. Time truly does fly when you’re having fun. For more than three decades, we have been blessed with the opportunity to create and publish Fayetteville and Cumberland County’s hyper local community newspaper.
It has been our privilege to serve the residents, businesses, organizations, visitors, and guests of this warm and welcoming Southern community by providing timely, honest, accurate, and trustworthy news, insights, opinions, arts, culture, entertainment, and relevant information that enriches the quality of life in our region.
Equally meaningful is the enduring legacy of our Best of Fayetteville readers survey. For 29 years, this beloved tradition has recognized the people, businesses, and organizations whose dedication, talent, passion, and investment have shaped the values and standards of excellence in our community. Year after year, these winners prove a simple truth: Good things last.
Best of Fayetteville: A Survey Built on Community Voice
Our Best of Fayetteville reader survey is unlike any other. Each year, we receive thousands of ballots and carefully record the comments and sentiments of our readers—citizens who take pride in determining who truly deserves to be honored as Fayetteville’s Best of the Best.
We have always been transparent: this survey is not scientific. It is an informal, well executed, and thoroughly documented community survey that has proven highly accurate and incredibly reliable for nearly three decades. Its longevity, popularity, and success speak for themselves.
The Best of Fayetteville designation must never be confused with other media advertising, marketing, or promotional programs. Our readers alone decide the winners. We do not accept nominations, and no person, business, or organization is required to purchase advertising, sponsorships, or event tickets to learn the results of the survey.
Most importantly, there can only be one Best of Fayetteville winner per category.
There are no second place or third place awards, and no honorable mentions. Strict, well defined, and closely monitored voting guidelines ensure the integrity, prestige, and honor of each designation.
Celebrating the 2026 Winners
Each year, we celebrate our Best of Fayetteville winners with an exclusive Awards Party at the Crown Coliseum Complex. This event is free to our winners and hosted by Up & Coming Weekly, the Greater Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, Speediprint of Westwood Shopping Center, the Crown Coliseum Complex, Beasley Media Group, and Fayetteville’s Hometown Utility, PWC.
It is at this celebration that we proudly recognize and honor the outstanding people, businesses, and institutions whose achievements have elevated our community over the past year.
Fayetteville has changed over the past 30 years—and so has our newspaper. But our commitment to our readers and to the Best of Fayetteville tradition has not. We continue to highlight the very best aspects of our community, and you, the reader, remain an essential part of the process. For this, we are deeply grateful.
We extend our sincere appreciation to all our sponsors for their support in making this year’s Awards Party a success—especially Nat Robertson, President of the Greater Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, and Don Garner, whose laser focused oversight provides the most critical component of any legitimate survey: accountability.
We also thank General Manager Seth Benalt and Assistant Manager Dorothy Strahley of the Crown Coliseum Complex for their outstanding work in coordinating and preparing the venue.
And finally, a very special thank you to the entire Up & Coming Weekly staff, who have spent months working tirelessly on this major undertaking.
Best of Fayetteville is our most significant and challenging event—and our most popular and most read edition of the year. With pride and professionalism, our staff has gone above and beyond to produce this award winning publication. Keep it handy and refer to it often.
Thank you for reading Up & Coming Weekly and for supporting Fayetteville’s only hyper local community newspaper.

(Photo: Bill Bowman, publisher of Up & Coming Weekly, presents the Best Seafood Restaurant award to 316 Oyster Bar at the 2025 Best of Fayetteville Awards at the Crown.)

Cumberland County School Board Candidate Johnathaun Lee: A call to Cumberland County to Unite

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Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Written by Johnathaun Lee

Let me ask you to consider something simple: What if Cumberland County decided that education was one issue important enough for us to approach together?
You may be Republican, Democrat, independent, or uninterested in political labels altogether. But when a child cannot read at grade level, misses weeks of school, feels unsafe in the classroom, or graduates unprepared for what comes next, that problem does not ask how you voted.
It affects your community.
Cumberland County Schools is making progress. Districtwide proficiency increased from 50.8% to 55.7% in 2025–26, and the four-year graduation rate reached a record 88.7%. Those numbers deserve recognition. But 55.7% proficiency also tells us plainly that substantial work remains.
Attendance tells a similar story. Chronic absenteeism stood at 33.76% for 2024–25—roughly one in three students. By the middle of 2025–26, that rate had fallen to 27.4%, an encouraging improvement, but still far from the district's attendance goals.
So perhaps our common enemies are already visible.
They are low proficiency, chronic absenteeism, unsafe learning environments, unrealized potential and policies that fail to produce results.
And another obstacle deserves attention: not political parties themselves, but the instinct to judge an education idea by who proposed it before asking whether it works.
That is where the old expression “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” takes on a different meaning.
You and I do not have to agree on everything to recognize the same problem. What if we agreed on the destination? Imagine a Cumberland County education agenda that could survive one election, one superintendent and one political season.
It might begin with a few questions most of us can understand: Can our children read and perform mathematics at grade level? Are they attending school? Are schools safe? Are graduates prepared for college, employment, technical training, military service, entrepreneurship or a skilled trade? When public money is invested in a program, can we demonstrate that it worked?
Those questions do not require ideological agreement. They require clarity of purpose.
The North Carolina School Boards Association teaches an important distinction. The school board governs; the superintendent administers. The board establishes policy, approves goals, monitors progress and provides direction. The superintendent implements those policies and manages the school system.
That distinction matters because governing well is not about trying to run a classroom from the boardroom. It is about asking better questions.
What are we trying to accomplish? Why is the problem occurring? What does the evidence show? What policy affects it? Are our resources aligned with our priorities? And did what we tried work?
Imagine if that became the language of education in Cumberland County. Then look beyond Cumberland County There is another opportunity worth discussing.
What if Cumberland County deliberately developed school-board members who became exceptionally knowledgeable about education governance—not merely successful politicians, but people who understood budgets, policy, accountability, facilities, transportation, student achievement and the consequences of statewide decisions?
Over time, some of those individuals could become credible candidates for service at the state level. That distinction is important because Cumberland County cannot simply elect someone to the North Carolina State Board of Education.
The State Board consists of the lieutenant governor, state treasurer and eleven members appointed by the governor and confirmed by the General Assembly. Eight appointed members represent education districts and three serve at large.
There is no formal requirement that someone serve on a local school board first. But local board service can provide something difficult to obtain from theory alone: experience seeing what happens when statewide policy reaches an actual classroom.
The State Board has constitutional responsibility for supervising and administering North Carolina's public-school system and educational funds and for establishing necessary rules and regulations within laws enacted by the General Assembly.
Think about the value of having someone at that table who understands Cumberland County not from a report, but from experience. What does a transportation policy mean to a rural family. What chronic absenteeism looks like inside a school. What an academic intervention cost?
What works—and what merely sounds good on paper. One purpose does not require one opinion Unity does not mean silence.
It does not mean Republicans must become Democrats or Democrats must become Republicans. It does not mean every disagreement disappears. It means recognizing that disagreement over how we get somewhere does not prevent us from agreeing about where our children need to go.
You can challenge my solution while still sharing my concern. I can disagree with your method while still respecting your goal. That is not political weakness. It is community maturity. Cumberland County does not need one political voice.
It could benefit from one educational purpose:
Students before partisanship.
Evidence before assumption.
Policy tied to results.
Accountability without micromanagement.
And perhaps, over time, something larger could grow from that approach: a county known not only for debating education policy, but for developing people capable of helping shape it statewide.
The goal would not be to guarantee Cumberland County a seat at the table. The goal would be to make sure that when opportunities to serve arise, Cumberland County has prepared people worthy of consideration for one. The idea is Johnathaun Lee’s; the plan belongs to Cumberland County.

Editor's Note: Johnathaun Lee's letter to the editor is another submission we have printed from a Cumberland County School Board candidate.
We welcome all letters from candidates, and encourage our readers to vote in November!

(Photo: Photo courtesy of Johnathaun Lee)

When Licensing Isn’t Worth the Cost

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Tuesday, 15 September 2026

Written by John Hood

When economist and Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell famously observed that “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs,” the North Carolina native wasn’t suggesting that public-policy analysis was useless. Sowell has spent much of his lengthy career engaged in it.
To say that doing X to achieve Y will inevitably cost Z is not to throw up one’s hands. It is merely to frame a series of questions for which there are at least partial answers. For example, what are the projected values of Y and Z? And can it be reasonably projected that doing X will actually accomplish Y?
Every dollar a government spends on, say, education or public safety is a dollar that cannot be simultaneously spent by government on, say, health care or transportation — or spent by the taxpayer who originally earned the dollar on something of his own choosing.
Unless you are an anarchist, you must grant that there are, indeed, circumstances in which it passes the cost-benefit test to collect those dollars as taxes and expend them on public services. And unless you are a socialist or deeply confused (I’ll distinguish the two as a gesture of good cheer), you must grant that there are circumstances in which it’s better to leave the dollar in private hands, either because the proposed program won’t work at all or because its benefits are too small to outweigh its costs.
The same principle applies to government regulation. While it compels private households or businesses to spend money rather than confiscating the money for government expenditure, tradeoffs are still inescapable. Every dollar spent installing scrubbers on smokestacks or taking classes to obtain a credential is a dollar that can’t be spent on something else with its own potential benefits. Similarly, every hour of time spent complying with regulation represents something not done during that hour.
Assessing the relevant tradeoffs can be very difficult. Agencies, regulated parties, and interest groups spend gobs of time and money attempting to quantify costs and benefits. So do think tanks and academic scholars. They could all be doing something else, so that’s another tradeoff! I happen to think sound policymaking is worth the expense.
For example, my John Locke Foundation colleagues and I have spent many years urging North Carolina lawmakers to scale back state-mandated licensure of occupations. Limiting the number of people allowed to deliver a particular good or service, or requiring the expenditure of much time and money to acquire such a permit, will necessarily impose significant costs on both consumers and prospective workers.
Those with licenses face fewer competitors and can charge more. Consumers shoulder the cost either by paying more or choosing less-desirable alternatives. Those excluded from licenses are forced into other occupations that pay less or that they value less.
Are these costs worth paying? Perhaps. If licensing physicians ensures safer, better-quality medical care, it might be worth it. If licensing barbers ensures fewer nicks or chemical burns, ditto. I suspect you probably agree with me that the former is a far likelier scenario than the latter.
Skeptics of North Carolina’s extensive occupational-licensing regime see more barbers in the story than we do physicians. We spotlight studies showing not just that licensing raises costs but that it often fails to deliver measurably better quality, safety, or protections against fraud.
The most recent example is a paper just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Taking advantage of a “natural experiment” — Uber drivers must be licensed as cabbies in New York City but not in neighboring New Jersey — the researchers found “no consistent evidence that occupational licensing improves consumer outcomes.”
Licensed drivers didn’t have lower accident rates or earn higher ratings from consumers. The authors also examined the case of Houston, where Uber drivers had to be licensed until a state law ended the requirement in 2017. “Deregulation changed the composition of the driver pool,” they concluded, “without changing measured performance.”
Tradeoffs are inevitable. Bad policy choices are not.

Editor’s note: John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).