Hey everyone,
I’d like you all to support my campaign for City Council in Wimington, NC. I’ve been published twice on Mises Daily, including my article Welfare Before the Welfare State, which has gotten over 2,000 “likes” on Facebook making it one of the most popular articles on Mises this year.
I’m trying to bring a genuine limited government perspective to city government, one that would make any Austrian proud.
I have concrete plans to reform our zoning code, reduce spending, and encourage transparency by putting our Purchase Orders online.
The people I’m running against are statists. From 2005 - 09, city spending increased 56%. We have red light cameras. We just got a license plate scanner that is going to scan people coming into the city. We have a zoning board telling people they can’t put up a sign in their window that takes up more than 10% of the window.
For my solutions, just go to www.fultonforcitycouncil.com. I’d also like you to donate (just click the ‘donate’ button), because like with any statists my opponents are well-funded.
Additionally, I’d like you to go to this news poll and vote for Joshua Fulton for your favorite City Council candidate.
Thank you!
Te Ne Cede Malis,
Joshua Fulton
Your link to the poll is the same as the link to your article.
Dude, you already have a hate site at www.therealjoshfulton.com. Are you going to address what they’ve said about you (most of which seems ridiculous)? Any idea who is running it? That’s quite a lot of work for a hate site.
That page won’t load for me.
The hate site is completely devoid of any logical reasoning. I suggest you point it out for what it is - more establishment propaganda to make the people afraid. A bunch of rehtorical question to make people scared and run into the arms of those who want status quo.
Yes, I agree you should at least address any direct attacks made on you. Politically, ignoring anything like that doesn’t help…even if it’s the mature thing to do. You want to win an election, you need to be smart about conducting a campaign. It doesn’t even have to be anything big. Just make a statement about it, and move on. But you need to address it. Otherwise it lingers. Look into the great campaigns (and managers) from history. A wealth of info there. (e.g. Lee Atwater, Karl Rove)
Seriously, why can’t I access the hate site?
Aha. Thanks for that!
Now I’m taking a gander at this hate site. My initial impression can be summed up in two words: red herring.
Edit: Two more words: character assassination. Let me add to this, actually. Whoever made this site - my bet is that he’s an employee of the City of Wilmington - is 1) honestly scared that Mr. Fulton can win the election, and 2) therefore trying to humiliate and intimidate him into withdrawing from the race. My advice to Mr. Fulton is to not do that, if only to show that he can’t be pushed around in such a manner.
This page is very interesting. My thoughts are in no particular order:
- The letter posted on the page could be a dead give-away that whoever made the hate site is connected to the mayor’s office for the City of Wilmington. Take a look at the date: September 15, 2011. I have no hard evidence for this, of course, but circumstantially it seems that the mayor requested information on average city employee salary to try to refute Mr. Fulton. (Mr. Fulton also links to a Google Doc version of it here, but the blog post under which it’s included was originally posted on July 4, 2011 - more than two months before the letter was sent.)
Correction: it’s not a letter. It’s an e-mail. The format is a dead match for an e-mail printed from Microsoft Outlook. Whoever posted it to the site printed it out and then scanned it. In my opinion, this is even more evidence in favor of the site creator being intimately connected to the City of Wilmington. I imagine that Mr. Fulton saved the printed-then-scanned e-mail image file from the site and uploaded it to Google Docs. (Mr. Fulton, please correct me on this if I’m mistaken.)
- The page claims that “the median salary for New Hanover County is $44,719.00/year”. Not quite. The very link they provide (also provided on Mr. Fulton’s blog post I linked to above) shows that this figure is actually for median household income. Note the word “household”. Right above it, under “Per capita money income in past 12 months (2009 dollars) 2005-2009”, is the figure that Mr. Fulton cites: $29,148. Note here the phrase “per capita”. Hence, even accepting (if only arguendo) the figure of $43,847 per year as the average money income for an employee of the City of Wilmington (i.e. the per capita money income), it appears that City of Wilmington employees take home just over 50% more money than the average person in New Hanover County.
In fairness, Mr. Fulton’s citing of the $29,148 figure as “the median individual income in New Hanover County during 2009” is inaccurate. It’s the average or mean income. However, this could be an honest mistake on Mr. Fulton’s part. On the other hand, what’s presented on the hate site seems to me like a deliberate distortion of the facts.
- The page erroneously claims that “Fulton claims that the City currently pays 90% of the employee premiums”. Mr. Fulton clearly refers to “as recently as 2009” in citing that percentage. Based on the screenshot of the spreadsheet posted, the City of Wilmington pays about 60% towards employee medical insurance. However, I could not find any link to that spreadsheet in the PDF booklet linked to on that page. Furthermore, the screenshot appears to be of an open Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Notice that the filename has “[1]” in it. This indicates that it’s been downloaded from somewhere else. Also note that the title bar for Excel includes “non-commercial use” - see here for what that means.
It seems that whoever claimed that the PDF booklet was the source of the spreadsheet was blatantly lying. That means the spreadsheet is an internal document for the City of Wilmington. Whoever took the screenshot probably downloaded it from a non-public fileshare area of the City of Wilmington’s web site, implying that he has non-public access to that site. The chances now seem even higher that the creator of the hate site is intimately connected to the City of Wilmington.
- The bit on the page about collective bargaining is a red herring. Regardless of the fact that North Carolina is a “right-to-work” state, the City of Wilmington has been choosing to pay its employees 50% more than the average person in New Hanover County gets paid. It apparently doesn’t even matter to the author of that passage, as the next paragraph completely changes tracks: now this pay is claimed to be “necessary” to run the city, especially in terms of keeping it safe. Once again the old canard of holding the city’s residents hostage by cutting the most essential (in the residents’ eyes) services is attempted.
Edit: I’ve archived the page in case its creator tries any shenanigans.
How come you guys are able to look into that site so much more logically than other people? 
Autolykos, you’re absolutely right about what that guy says about the median income for the county I live in. It’s available right on the census page, but the author goes through this long calculation about how if we adjust the 2000 median income for inflation, etc., etc. Wrong. The actual 2009 census data is available on the webpage and gives an entirely different number.
I have responded to that website. It really wasn’t more than a blip on my radar when I first saw it, but now it’s gotten some media attention, so unfortunately it’s got to be dealt with. …It’s funny how people can make a story about you out of nothing.
In any case, thanks to all you guys!
No problem. I’m curious as to whether you think my suspicions about who created the hate site hold water.
The funniest thing to me about that whole site is that, while it accuses you of being insufficiently transparent, the person who created the site is shrouding himself in almost complete secrecy. I’m an atheist, but I can’t help but think of the part in the Gospel where Jesus tells someone to take the beam out of his own eye before pointing out the mote in his brother’s. 
Furthermore, comparing transparency about one’s private life with transparency about a government’s actions is like comparing apples to oranges. What do you think?
Your views are extremely close to my own. I would not put the person necessarily within the mayor’s (or here city manager’s office), but yes, that information would have had to have come from an information request or someone with direct access to that info, which would have had to have been one of a very few number of people. I think it probably came from a public information request and hopefully when we found out who requested it all this can be cleared up.
Unfortunately, I don’t want to speculate more because this is, essentially, a public forum.
I noticed that too, Autolykos. Whoever created this site paid up for the domain privacy from GoDaddy.com. I’m not sure why anyone would care about a City Council member’s blog posts or what they think of Iran (you will have absolutely zero power to affect Iran in any way). The attacks are pretty vicious and low, though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it were a government employee. Remind me never to run for office.