Is Individual Liberty Among Perdue’s “Core Priorities”?

The N&O’s Under the Dome blog reproduces a copy of an email sent by Gov. Perdue to state employees in light of her “reorganization” plan that will likely lead to state worker layoffs.

You are this state’s most valuable resource. That is why, today, as I announce a significant change in how I want to see our state government work, I am reaching out to you. You deserve to learn directly from me about my plans to restructure state government, because it will affect you and because, ultimately,I can’t do it without you. We will take the economic difficulties facing us and forge them into opportunity. Our economy has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, as have our methods of communicating and our ways of doing business. In that time, state government has largely stayed the same. The times we are in call for reshaping, reinvention and innovation. We must tear down the parts of bureaucracy that don’t work and rebuild a state government that focuses on our core priorities. To me, those core priorities are clear: jobs, investing in our children’s education and safer and healthier communities.

The letter, of course, is a preemptive strike against the backlash Perdue is sure to face from state employees – which also happens to be a major special interest group crucial to her re-election hopes.

But what I find of particular interest is Perdue’s repeated reference to focusing state government on its “core priorities.” Indeed, this would present a clear opportunity for Perdue to clearly define her vision for government’s role in our lives, what she believes the relationship between citizens and the State should be. Her vague, principle-free and generally thoughtless mantra of “jobs, investing in our children’s education and safer and healthier communities,” offers no insight into Perdue’s basic beliefs regarding individual liberty versus State control.

Nowhere have I seen Perdue include in her list of “core priorities” of state government any reference to, as stated in Section 1, Article 1 of the state constitution, a protection of our “inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of their own labor, and the pursuit of happiness.”