The nation’s Founders designed our government to be the servant of the people. Here in North Carolina, some policies in recent years seem to have turned that premise on its head. Roy Cordato, John Locke Foundation vice president for research and resident scholar, discussed the topic with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Martinez: In your recent paper, you actually have an official economic name for this. It’s called demand-side management. But really, what is it for lay people?
Cordato: Actually, it’s more of a political term for it. It’s the idea that government in certain areas, in order to accomplish its goals with respect to how people live their lives, put in place policies to manipulate demand — demand for energy, demand for transportation and how people get around, demand for housing, demand for land — all kinds of things basically to nudge people, to use a term that’s gotten somewhat popular lately — to nudge people in a certain direction determined by social engineers. It is an approach to government that is based on political engineering.
Martinez: So if that’s the political approach, is it fair to say that the opposite would be free markets, which is more of an economic term than a political term?
Cordato: Yes. Absolutely. In the marketplace, suppliers of goods and services basically have to be very attentive to what consumers want and the demand side of the market — not to manipulate it, but to try to figure out what people actually want so they can provide the goods and services they want in order to earn a profit. What this [demand-side management by government] has done is completely turned it on its head and said, “We want people to live in a certain way. We want people to travel in a certain way, and we are going to put in place regulations, taxes, and so on to get those people to live the lives that we, the bureaucrats, want them to live.”
Martinez: So the political framework seems to be winning the day here in North Carolina. Why?
Cordato: Well, in certain areas, that’s absolutely true. In the area of transportation, in particular, there are documents from the Department of Transportation which specifically say, “Our goal is to manipulate behavior on the part of the citizens. We want to manipulate their behavior to get them. …” One of the things they say right off — we want to get people out of their cars and onto public transportation, and so we are going to implement all kinds of policies to try to get them to do that. It includes smart-growth policies, managing how people use land, and investing a lot of money into light rail because that is the mode of choice, not of people who want to travel, but of the planners who want them to travel in a certain way.
Martinez: That’s an interesting point. You say not of people who want to travel. So why, then, is public transportation — and rail specifically — being pushed?
Cordato: Well, I think there is an ideological agenda behind this. There is a vision of how planners want people to live. They envision people living in high-density communities where they walk everywhere. They draw nice pictures of what these communities will look like. They really do not like what they pejoratively call sprawl — what I think is simply low-density living — people living in suburban communities with their own yards and privacy and coming together in communities in that way which suits their own lifestyles so it gives them mobility and freedom. I actually think that part of this agenda is really to destroy certain lifestyle freedoms.
Martinez: So we’ve talked about transportation. You also write in your paper that energy is another area in which you see this happening a lot. How is this [demand-side management by government] implemented in the energy sector of policy?
Cordato: Well, in North Carolina, the state put in place Senate Bill 3 — S.B. 3 — which is a bill that has two halves. One is it tells people what kind of energy sources they can use. So it puts a cap on low-cost energy sources like coal, natural gas, and sets a minimum amount of energy that has to be generated from things like wind and solar — basically telling people how they can consume energy. But there’s another half, which is really egregious. It’s called the energy efficiency standard, which actually puts a cap on the amount of energy people can use. And it’s up to Duke Power and Progress Energy to put in place all kinds of programs — Save-a-Watt program and so on — to get people to use energy. Notice what’s behind all of this is manipulating people’s demand for energy. They’re saying, “Look, you cannot consume energy in this way. You can’t use certain kinds of light bulbs, for example. You have to buy certain high energy-efficient appliances, even if they cost you a lot more.” It’s a manipulation of lifestyles. At the federal level, we see it with miles-per-gallon standards for automobiles and so on.
Martinez: So if demand-side management is a political animal, is there a political solution?
Cordato: Yes. I think what has to happen is that the mentality of bureaucrats and of legislators has to be — for example in the area of transportation — we should look to try to discover what it is people want. What are the lifestyles that people want to live, and then what we do is we try to, in the provision of goods and services that government does provide — for example, roads and water and other things — we try to find ways to meet that demand. So instead of trying to get people out of their cars by making driving more miserable, which is what they are trying to do in many instances, what we try to do and what they should try to do is accommodate the fact that people want to drive their cars. Maybe build more roads, widen more roads, better roads, and so on, and not put lots of money into light-rail transportation, into trying to force people into high-density living arrangements and so on — the point of which is to accommodate light rail, to get people to take light rail. So, yes, what the government should be doing is looking to what people want and then trying to meet those needs.
Martinez: Do you have any hopes for the new General Assembly, that some of this might be scaled back?
Cordato: Well, I have hopes, but to be quite frank, S.B. 3, the bill I mentioned before — the energy bill — no Republicans opposed it, no Republicans voted against it in the Senate, and only four Republicans voted against it in the House when it passed in 2007. So a lot of Republicans — they may be fiscal conservatives, but in terms of personal freedom and allowing people to live the lifestyles they choose — I don’t think have a great track record.