JLF president John Hood weighs in on the Dix land deal, which the N.C. Senate just voted to fix:

Imagine that the first-term governor of your state declined to seek reelection. In the interim between the election of his successor and his leaving office, this lame-duck governor sought to use the power of his office to make a last-minute real estate deal.

Commander Hood doesn’t wade into partisan politics here, and I myself try to avoid political relativism, but it’s too good to pass up here. So just imagine the outcry if a Republican lame-duck governor sought to use the power of his office to make a last minute real estate deal.

I remember the argument made by some that making the Dix property into a park would benefit all of North Carolina’s citizens because they’d travel from the far corners of the state to visit. Hood turns that argument on its head:

The Dorothea Dix property may be in Raleigh but it does not belong to Raleigh. It belongs to North Carolinians as a whole – to people in Winston-Salem and Wingate and Waynesville and Wilmington who will never set foot in the new Dix park. If Perdue had given Raleigh a lease or sale at a reasonable price, and those proceeds had been earmarked for health and human services, their interests would have been satisfied and Raleigh would have gotten its long-desired park, albeit by paying for it properly.

Instead, there was a rotten deal. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that the honorable thing to do is fix it.

I’d argue the same could be said for difficult vote not to expand Medicare in North Carolina. While the left and the mainstream media are fond of labeling it as a ‘war on the poor,’ it’s also important to remember that wasting already scant resources on a broken system doesn’t benefit anyone.