RALEIGH — Winston-Salem officials set some new Lowe’s in North Carolina government this week by choosing big-box retailers as the Target of a development moratorium.

Painful puns seem appropriate as one response to the city council’s unfunny decision to impose a 90-day halt to all commercial developments of 150,000 square feet or more. While the measure had to be drafted to apply generally, I guess, so as not to single out officially a single company, it was obvious that six of Winston-Salem’s eight council members were reacting to a proposed third Wal-Mart supercenter in Forsyth County.

Of course, the moratorium is merely a breather so that planning officials can “evaluate the rules for designing and developing such projects.” Right. It would require a deep discount indeed for me to buy that line.

For one thing, supporters made clear that the moratorium could be extended. For another, Winston-Salem’s action fits all-too-snugly within a broader pattern of local anti-growth activists and potential Wal-Mart competitors seizing every opportunity to block the company’s continued expansion. At a new website chronicling the ins and outs of this debate, you can see that kooks have already taken the movement a step further in San Francisco. They are seeking to use city permitting to make the city “big-box free.”

And then there’s Jesse Jackson. “It’s Kool-Aid and cyanide,” he said of Wal-Mart earlier this week. “The Kool-Aid is the cheap prices. The cyanide is the cheap wages. The cyanide is the cheap health benefits…

“The Wal-Martization of the country is like a Trojan horse. It’s exciting on the outside, but on the inside is a machinery that destroys competition.”

What is the source of this animus against Wal-Mart, and more generally against large, discount retail stores? Critics say the stores are ugly, vulgar, exploitative, and disruptive of traditional, downtown shopping districts. Part of the veritable rage they feel can safely be attributed to the fact that their views are entirely, embarrassingly out of sync with the actual preferences of millions of Americans who value the convenience, selection, service, and affordable prices. Often self-styled “progressive” advocates for the disadvantaged, such critics are really regressive champions of a mythical past who seem rather callous about the effects of their governmental mucking-around on average families.

What about competition? Loudmouths like Jesse Jackson assert that big-box retailers are a threat to competition, apparently under a scenario in which they will price everyone else out of the market and then jack up their prices to gouge their now-captive consumers. This discredited “predatory pricing” theory has been repeated incessantly for a century by regulators, without it ever having occurred in the real world. The home-improvement and discount-shopping stores have obviously pushed the cost of goods and services downward, not upward, and will continue to do so as long as they do not face interference from federal, state, or local policymakers willing to indulge the prejudice of elites and the mercenary interests of competitors or labor unions.

I wish these obnoxious bullies would learn to mind their own business. They’re driving me up the Wal.

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