RALEIGH – Some may call it compassion, but I would use a more accurate and damning term.

I’m referring to what many politicians have been saying about the many North Carolinians who have been displaced over the past few years by technological and other pressures on traditional industries. Many federal, state, and local leaders wrung their hands and wondered aloud how “we” would “find new jobs” for these unfortunate souls.

I presume they meant well. But I also presume they didn’t realize how patronizing and insulting they sounded. To treat hard-working, independent North Carolina adults as if they were hapless children is to demean them and the traditional values they’ve held for generations.

North Carolinians have been through many bouts of economic churning. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, an agrarian society saw its small farmers gradually abandon the countryside in the face of technological change and economies of scale. They moved to towns and cities to find work. African-Americans, scalded by segregation, overcame a multitude of barriers to build a better future for their families and to challenge the legal and social structures that oppressed them. Long before there were government job-training programs, massive higher-education subsidies, programs offering free health care and child care and housing – long before, in other words, politicians endeavored to “help” North Carolinians lose their initiative and self-reliance – we picked up, moved on, toughed it out, learned new skills, started new businesses, and found the new opportunities that all that economic churning had turned up.

Incomes and living standards rose. The real price of food, clothing, and shelter fell. New technologies generated goods, services, and professions that our parents and grandparents could never have dreamed of. And this didn’t happen because some brilliant egghead ensconced in a office somewhere in Raleigh or Washington drew up a plan to “save” North Carolina.

It is simply false to suggest, as the Luddites did in the 19th century and the protectionists who brought us the Great Depression did in the 20th century, that technology and trade are the enemies of economic progress. They are among its invaluable allies. It is also false to suggest that North Carolina needs some massive investment of taxpayer money to create a new economy based on industry sectors – be they tech, tourism, or turfgrass – chosen by the “experts” to define our future. We already spend nearly $8,000 per student on K-12 public education, more than $10,500 per student subsidizing universities, and hundreds of millions more a year in state and federal dollars on job-training programs that are largely ineffective. The answer is not to send more students to four-year colleges. About half of the students already enrolled in such colleges (mostly in government schools for which taxpayers shell out most of the cost) don’t graduate. And it is a myth that most of the good jobs of the future require a university education. Just to take one example, the metal-working trades reportedly offer good starting salaries and the potential to earn $55,000 a year or more.

What we need is primarily what past generations of North Carolinians needed to improve their lot: freedom. Entrepreneurs need freedom from excessive taxes and regulations so they can try out new ideas – employing North Carolina workers and capital to do so. Workers need freedom from archaic policies that trap their payroll taxes in clumsy unemployment-insurance programs and distort labor and training markets with selective subsidies.

So listen up, politicians: no more attempts to infantilize your fellow citizens. They are adults. Free them.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.