I love room taxes, and like people wondering if they should visit Haywood County, think they should be high enough to marginalize some vacations. The best thing about room taxes is they are taxation without representation.

Becki Gray of the John Locke Foundation visited Maggie Valley recently to talk about increasing the room tax. Gray asked the group if organizations that work to stimulate local tourism and travel are engaging in a legitimate function of government. Pulling from my bag of phrases that should be altered because nobody in power is listening, government selection of economic winners and losers crowds out other ventures that free choice might prefer. It’s called economic distortion, which is never a good thing if prosperity be what ye seek. Economists, of course, knock this down, saying whatever actions government takes can in no way crowd out anything in the market. The only opportunity costs are those of not going along with the program.

Supporters in attendance were described as died-in-the-wool Republicans. Detractors were of two types: those who opposed the John Locke Foundation for opposing all taxes (a false premise), and those who oppose the opposition of a room tax because it is impossible to get in peoples’ minds to find out what flap of butterfly wings pushes which synapse beyond the breaking point. One dude explained how diverting resources from production and trade to overhead and administration puts more back into production and trade than would have been there:

“When government spends this tax, it is not taxing and spending. It is generating more business and more jobs in the community,” said Steve Morse, a professor of tourism and hospitality at Western Carolina University. “If you look at taxes as an investment, and you have an aggressive savvy tourism group in Haywood County, that investment in taxes will generate tenfold more in money if it is spent right.”

In other words, if I were to take a badly-needed, long vacation, I would be wasting my money. I might pay an airline, spend money at the gas station, eat out, buy a few concert tickets. I could even become a travel agent and get busloads of people to take similar trips. But that would not put one cent toward job creation, because government covers that. Last year, the Haywood Tourism Authority gave $17,000 to the Maggie Valley Lodging Association. After economic multipliers are applied, the number is closer to eleventy-jillion. Raising the tourism tax, therefore, would create mind-blowing wealth.