As North Carolina voters prepare to cast their ballots next week, John Locke Foundation analysts are sharing their expertise about the top races. President John Hood moderated one of the last forums in the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. The Hickory Daily Record previewed Monday’s “Hometown Forum” in Asheboro and reported the results. A Salisbury Post editorial this week also cited Hood’s recent column dissecting the race for lieutenant governor. Meanwhile, the Greensboro News & Record highlighted Hood’s take on the importance of North Carolina to the Democratic presidential contest. Speaking of that Democratic battle, Vice President for Communications Jon Ham sparked national media interest with a blog entry on the topic this week. Ham noted that Sen. Barack Obama had chosen to denounce his former pastor a day after Ham had been polled on the topic. The Rush Limbaugh program reported on the story, citing the work of “Mary Katharine Ham’s dad.” (You can hear Limbaugh by clicking on the second audio clip here.) In other election-related news, JLF Legal and Regulatory Policy Analyst Daren Bakst discussed with Matt Mittan’s WWNC Radio listeners a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on photo identification requirements for voters. If either of the major Democratic presidential candidates wins in November, we’re likely to see more collectivist policy proposals. That’s bad news to JLF Project Management Specialist Paul Messino, who just won the Free Society Institute’s Slovenian Hayek Essay Prize. Messino’s essay, “Memes, The Free Market, & Economic Knowledge,” argues in favor of F.A. Hayek’s thesis in the “Use of Knowledge In Society” that social planning is impossible because no one person could have all the information necessary to make supply and demand decisions. As Messino writes: “I support Hayek’s thesis by arguing that there is a biological, evolutionary, and memetic reason for why this is so.”
