Asheville has a new think tank. Writer extraordinaire Cecil Bothwell announced its formation with the following:

A few of us have noticed that North Carolina’s John Locke Foundation puts out a steady flow of conservative policy suggestions which end up as content in newspapers like Mountain Xpress and on the desks of public officials. We think other voices should be heard on issues that affect all of us, every day. So we created the Vance Policy Institute.

The first initiative will be an attempt to enact local legislation similar to Florida’s Sunshine Law. This is good. But why contrast it to the John Locke Foundation’s conservativism? The statement could leave somebody who doesn’t make a hobby of reading policy reports wondering of the JLF, like the statue of Thomas Jefferson in the old Cato Institute ads, “I thought it said limited government.”

If partisans would stop demonizing each other long enough to listen to what is being said, both sides might hear each other saying that people need to be free enough to exercise common sense. Maybe we would see that Democrats are advocating for those making demands in the community while Republicans are advocating for the suppliers. A point of balance could be approached.

Instead, in Asheville, anybody trying to fulfill their civic duty by being involved in government, who isn’t a Democrat, is perceived to be getting kickbacks from greedy developers. The cause of people trying to check the flow of power from the people to the government is severely hampered by the stereotype.