RALEIGH – Now that the 2011 election cycle is history, committed voters will begin to turn their attention to next year’s crop of political candidates, and occasional voters may begin to pay attention to politics after taking a year off.

Most voters will judge these candidates – for president, Congress, governor, state legislature, and other offices – on the basis of whether they offer sensible and realistic solutions to our economic woes.

What policies do they think will best draw investor dollars into new business ventures and job creation? Can governments address their long-term fiscal imbalances while also boosting growth? What can be done to improve the productivity of spending in physical and human capital – that is, in infrastructure and workforce development?

These are the right questions. Each has a good answer, but translating the answers into salable policies will be challenging. After all, if it was politically painless to reform taxes, privatize government assets or services, and increase choice and competition in education, these policies would have long since been implemented.

Rather than begin with what political candidates should promise to do, it might make more sense to begin with what they should not do. Here’s a handy list of tempting but unhealthful political confections that would-be leaders of North Carolina and the nation should swear off in the strongest possible terms:

• Crony Candy. Government should never attempt to predict which businesses will succeed and then risk public money on the accuracy of their predictions. Such predictions assume too much knowledge on the part of central planners, and inevitably become junked up with special-interest pleading and crony capitalism. Just say no to “investing” taxpayer money in particular firms or industries. Just say no to all bailouts and loan guarantees.

• Bubble Gum. The Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery of the past four years began with the collapse of the housing bubble, including all the securities markets and financial deals based on the idea of real estate as the economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. It’s not. Real estate is one class of assets among many. Abolish loan guarantees, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, the mortgage-interest deduction, “quantitative easing,” Smart Growth regulations, and all other government policies that either inflate artificial bubbles in housing demand or gum up the ability to meet real demand with new housing stock.

• Tunnel Cakes. Never spend government dollars on infrastructure projects with the goal of creating jobs. Spend government dollars on infrastructure projects that promise to move lots of people or freight at a low cost – which will typically be roads and bridges, not passenger rail. If you do that, you’ll create construction jobs as a welcome side effect of investing in valuable infrastructure, which is fine and dandy. The problem is that if you start with the wrong goal, you may end up doing the equivalent of paying people to shovel dirt from one hole to another. These shovel-wielders would be “working,” but not productively, and so the money spent on them will represent lost jobs elsewhere in the economy.

• Moon Pies. If advocates of solar power, wind power, feces power, or whatever can manage to convince private investors to finance their pie-in-the-sky experiments, fine. But leave taxpayers and captive utility ratepayers out of it. The energy needs of North Carolina and the nation will continue to be met primarily with fossil fuels for decades to come, and the current boom in oil and gas exploration promises to lower costs and employ thousands – as long as government does its proper job of ensuring public health and otherwise gets out of the way.

Instead of indulging in political junk food, candidates should propose a sound diet of enhancing public services through competition, balancing budgets, reforming tax and regulatory codes to promote growth, and taking better care of the infrastructure government already owns and operates.

In short, no more sugar rushes. Let’s stick to meat and potatoes – or tofu and brussels sprouts, as the case may be. I’m not particular, as long as I don’t have to buy your lunch as well as mine.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.