RALEIGH – Sometimes, government blows up its budget in one big, dumb flurry of fiscal insanity – such as we’ve seen from Washington over the past six months. But at the local level, governments tend to grow incrementally, in dribs and drabs, by poor decisions made with excessive haste, faulty information, and undue influence.

While the problem routinely crops up in North Carolina localities from the mountains to the coast, I’ll illustrate it today with an example from the fast-growing Wake County town of Cary.

As the Triangle Business Journal reports, the Triangle Aquatic Center is “swimming in troubled financial waters and wants the town of Cary to throw it a $14 million life preserver.” No, I don’t blame reporter Chris Baysden for employing a corny pun. The subject matter deserves it.

The background on this situation sounds like fiction, but it’s fact. Some years ago, local swimming boosters got together to draw up plans for an aquatics center. Early on, the group divided into competing camps. Some of the disagreement involved the design and business plan. Others differed on whether Cary or other local governments should be asked to subsidize the project.

Eventually, a faction chose to move ahead with the Triangle Aquatic Center, to be supported by a local philanthropist and fees from swim teams, schools, and other users. Subsequently, town officials and assorted economic-development hustlers tried to do a parallel, taxpayer-subsidized project, but it petered out.

Now, after several years of independent operation, the TAC folks find themselves with excessive debt and insufficient revenue. They want to sell the facility to the town – and town officials, despite the past run-in, seem receptive to the idea.

Add in the odd spectacle of a Wake County commission election being centered largely on the same TAC-vs.-Cary controversy, and you have a riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by irony and bordered by idiocy.

To say that the TAC would be considered a success if it weren’t for all the debt it can’t afford is no different, and no more sensible, than saying metropolitan daily newspapers would be profitable except for all the debt they’ve shouldered in recent years. The cost of acquiring capital is an inescapable element of any business plan. If it doesn’t cover its costs, it is not a viable business.

Why should the taxpayers of the town of Cary pay to bail out a failed business model? And if it’s not a failed business model, why does it need a bail out?

Much like previous cases of local-government overreach, from golf courses to convention centers to sports stadiums, a government takeover of the TAC would, among other things, force other private firms to compete with a subsidized enterprise. It’s not just the private swim schools and clubs I’m talking about (though the fact that my sister owns and runs an entirely private school, the Charlotte Swim Academy, does make me particularly sensitive to the unfairness of the situation). Parents looking to enroll their children in extracurricular activities are presented with a wide variety of options: sports leagues, dance, music, gymnastics, swimming, and more. Cost is one of the factors they consider, along with convenience, schedules, interest, and aptitude. If some competitors have their facilities paid for by taxpayers while others must cover their capital costs with fees, the market is skewed.

Government was not instituted among us for the purpose of forcing bystanders to pay for our hobbies. It exists to protect our natural rights and finance certain public goods that, for technical reasons, cannot be effectively priced.

Swim instruction and competition are not public goods. They are private goods, for which every participant or spectator can and should be charged. The town of Cary has better things to do with its taxpayers’ money than pick up someone else’s tab for a facility the town didn’t build and shouldn’t have built.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation