RALEIGH – Don’t play a crooked game. Don’t accept cards from a stacked deck, or bet on loaded dice. And no, this is not a set up for another piece about why North Carolina should not inflict a state-run lottery on its citizenry (though, of course, North Carolina should not inflict a state-run lottery on its citizenry).

Today’s topic is federal highway funding. It’s time to face facts about the current financing system, which forces motorists to 1) pay some number of dollars to Washington every time they fill up their gas tanks and then 2) plead for those dollars back to build and maintain their roads. This system is a racket, doing North Carolinians and most other Americans little good.

The benefits flow primarily to Washington, to organized labor, and to certain favored states. First, having a federal highway program means having a federal highway bureaucracy and highway committees in Congress that can appear magnanimously to “invest” in “necessary” infrastructure to “get” America “moving again.” There is nothing magical about federal funding. It is just state or local funding that has flowed to D.C., lost some of its value due to political shipping & handling charges, and then flowed back. But Washington is like Las Vegas in this regard: it’s all about show, about appearances rather than reality.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to insult Las Vegas like that. Perhaps it’s the Baptist in me.

Second, organized labor benefits because the use of federal dollars triggers something called the Davis-Bacon Act, a decades-old piece of pilferage that requires federally funded projects to pay union-scale wages. That raises the price of highways – motorists get less for more – while propping up unions and reducing the advantage that right-to-work states enjoy over others.

Third, everything else being equal, federal funding benefits some states, particularly in the Northeast and West, as the expense of others, including North Carolina. A new report from Robert Utt at the Heritage Foundation puts this effect in stark relief, removing the usual blather about this by revealing that since 1956, North Carolina has received an average of about 81 cents in return for every highway-tax dollar sent in. California (.87), Michigan (.82), Indiana (.80), and Ohio (.84) have also been net losers in the deal, while net winners include far-flung places like Alaska, Hawaii, and Montana, plus the Northeast corridor and, yes, the District of Columbia.

Usually, when state politicians start complaining about how North Carolina doesn’t get its fair share of highway funds, their suggestions to fix the problem range from “work harder” to “apply for transit funds” to “elect our incumbents repeatedly until they get seniority.” My responses range from “that’s dumb” to “that’s really dumb” to “that’s really, really dumb and makes me doubt your sanity.”

We’ve been net donors to the system for nearly 50 years. By now, we should understand that the dice are loaded.

North Carolina’s goal should be to end the current system altogether. Put state highway dollars to work more or less where they are collected. Those who drive a lot out of state will pay a lot of out-of-state gas taxes. Those who don’t, won’t. That’s close enough to workable for me.

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