It’s time to reframe NC’s economic debate

Desperate to make progress, North Carolina’s earliest modern politicians made the state inherently conservative. At the beginning of the 20th century, the state’s backwardness inspired our leaders to initiate a strong drive for industrialization. And while this focus on development imbued the state’s politics with a salutary farsightedness, the capitalist imperative endowed business lobbyists with a final veto on any policy that seemed to derail the thrust toward industrial modernity. As a result, plutocracy has reigned in Raleigh for a century.

When the white-supremacist Gov. Charles Aycock took office, his state was shrouded in darkness. Workers earned less than half the average national wage, and the basic appearances of modern life were absent from most North Carolian communities. Poverty was grinding and intergenerational. A larger portion of North Carolinians were illiterate than anywhere else in the notoriously retrograde Southern states.

This socioeconomic quagmire had North Carolina’s panjandrums in a state of despair. The only way out of the muck, it seemed, was to grasp for capital investments lured south from the Northern states.

In the words of journalist Rob Christensen, industrial recruitment became “almost a religion” in North Carolina. From the early 20th century to today, attracting business investment has been considered the paragon of good governance in this state.

To a certain degree, the industrialization drive has been a success. In the parts of the state that have attracted new businesses, incomes have risen and the population has boomed. For example, the Research Triangle Park transformed a humid, unpopulated hardwood forest into a buzzing metropolis gaining thousands of workers every year.

Other parts of the state have continued to struggle or even lose their industrial bases, but our 100-year effort to lurch into the national economic mainstream has raised living standards in urban North Carolina.

But over the decades, this emphasis on industrial recruitment has come to so thoroughly dominate the thinking of leading North Carolinians that it has limited our ability to make further progress. The monomania for attracting investment has privileged business perspectives to the point that a more authentically progressive perspective resides outside the circle of realistic policy alternatives.

This must change. Because even though North Carolina has crawled out of the cave of provincial backwardness, it remains a state wrought with wrenching hardship and poverty, particularly in our rural communities, that no decent society would tolerate.

Thousands of North Carolinians live at a level of penury that leading authorities describe as “extreme poverty.” Homelessness is widespread both in costly college towns like Chapel Hill and Carrboro and in rural communities like Hickory where jobs have become so scarce that even cheap housing is out of reach for many people. In eastern North Carolina, some people sell their own blood to survive.

This landscape is an outrage against decency, and no amount of industrial recruitment can salve the wound. North Carolina Central basketball coach Levelle Moton, a man of great wisdom and depth, has described his bewilderment that the state’s leadership could conduct the people’s business blocks away from his impoverished childhood neighborhood, where a man once bled to death after being stabbed on a basketball court.

Recruiting business is by no means an ignoble objective, but the well-being of North Carolina’s people is an imperative far deeper and more profound. Sen. Phil Berger once glibly said “North Carolina is open for business.” The sad reality is that it is closed to the poor.

Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org .

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