Gene Nichol, professor of law at UNC, regularly writes about political issues and does so from a statist perspective — he always wants government to grow and take on additional powers in order to make society better. I have been reading his articles for a long time. They used to be merely ignorant of the consequences of expanding the scope of government: changed incentives, trade-offs, misallocation of resources, etc. Recently, however, he has gone from simply making weak arguments to writing shrill, vicious, ad hominem laden rants.
In today’s Pope Center piece, Jane Shaw and Francis DeLuca call him out.
I doubt that it ever crosses Nichol’s mind that inflammatory rhetoric (he recently compared Governor McCrory with Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox) persuades no one who is unsure about the policies he so vehemently opposes, but probably does agitate the easily angered part of the statist coalition, increasing the possibility of random violence against anyone those people believe is an enemy.
If you want to be part of the scholarly community, you should weigh your words much more carefully than Nichol does.
