Many at the Capitol in Charleston and some throughout the media are perplexed by my opposition to the deal in the works between the state and Form Energy, a startup company with the stated intent of bringing a battery-production facility to Weirton. How could I be opposed to the 750 jobs the company promises? How could I be opposed to helping the Northern Panhandle? The answer, of course, is that I am opposed to neither jobs, nor to helping our region in the Northern Panhandle. What I do stand against, however, is spending hundreds of millions of our taxpayers’ dollars to recruit into our home a foreign-backed corporate enterprise that has openly declared its hostile opposition to what makes us who we are. Let me explain.

The function of government is the promotion of the common good. What is the common good? This is a topic of great debate among political theorists and gurus–and few can provide a complete answer. I think, though, at the very least, we can all agree that the common good is, in the end, what produces genuine happiness. No doubt, this sounds abstract and even a bit strange at first. But, then again, the founders of our nation declared “the pursuit of happiness” to be one of the very foundations of our society. It is worth a few minutes to consider what exactly this means.

Happy people are always happy together, which is to say, happiness is social by its nature. Happy people are parts of happy communities, and at the very least, members of the smallest community–the family. Aristotle, writing some two millennia before the founding of America, argued that the state ought to cultivate “family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, and amusements which draw men together” because “the end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it.” Of course, the state cannot “make” people happy precisely because the state cannot create these small communities. Happiness, then, is decentralized. Contrary to this ancient tradition, totalitarian states throughout history have sought to produce happiness by amassing power toward the center, through concentrating political, economic, and cultural power and deploying it according to master plans. Almost always, this results in the opposite of happiness–misery–in large part because it destroys real communities. Such grand central actions fail to understand that happiness is little, while the state is always big.

The centralization of power is rarely conducive to the common good. Rather, it is the diffusion of power, and I mean all power–political, economic, cultural–which seems to be the most conducive to the creation of prosperous and just communities. Through such diffusion, communities can exist with distinct identities, characteristics, and real differences which become the object of the love of those who live in them. Few people truly love the local mall or the local DMV–because they are from the center–because they are like every other mall and every other DMV. Many people, however, love the local restaurant, the family-owned business, the local courthouse, and the local sports team–because they are their own. The point here is that centralized political, economic, and cultural power creates a sort of unlovable homogenous uniformity which leads to a bleak sadness–even despair.

What does all this have to do with a battery factory in Weirton? Form Energy is not from or “of” West Virginia. In fact, Form Energy espouses a value system that can be immediately recognized as hostile to the interests of West Virginia’s cohesive communities. The introduction of such a force–through our own state’s actions–of an organization which is directly antithetical to the values that sustain our local communities is a mistake. It is very difficult to doubt that a corporate enterprise like Form Energy will not work to replace the ethos that makes us who we are in West Virginia–with efforts to deform our culture into another cookie-cutter version of centralized “woke” uniformity.

Further, once they receive our money from our public treasury and settle within our home, why should Form Energy ever not start to “throw its weight around?” This is just how the world works–and this new kind of “weight” will have consequences. I am not only speaking of moral values. I am also speaking about economics. Form Energy has explicitly expressed that its long-term goal is the elimination of coal and natural gas. Coal and natural gas, of course, are resources that we have–we own them. Form Energy would like to transform our coal and natural gas from valuable resources to a big pile of messy rocks and a collection of worthless air pockets. Ultimately, such fanatical ventures like this will help make us weak and dependent.

Form Energy has investors all over the world, including some with ties to investors from China and Saudi Arabia. Undoubtedly, our communities may get some wages and a few new buildings–but we won’t get the capital, we won’t get the profits, and we won’t truly own much of anything new. Rather, we will work to enrich elites around the globe who do not care about our communities. They will treat our people as third-world citizens, whom these elites have no qualms about abusing.

Our public treasury ought to be used to diffuse power down and into our communities. How many small businesses can we help jump-start throughout our small towns and communities? How many small manufacturers could we get off the ground? How many new training vocations can we assist and help our own people to run? Can we spend this money in a way that doesn’t centralize political and economic power into the hands of people from who knows where, who clearly don’t value what we do?

I think we can. And I think we must.

I understand why many politicians want Form Energy to come. It is tempting to just throw money at a problem and hope that someone from the outside will arrive and solve it for us. But that is not how the world works. There is always a catch. The catch here is that we lose our power–we become subservient. We need to use our resources to build us up. If we do not do this, if we scramble for the scraps of the elites who are accumulating as much power as possible toward the center, we will lose the very thing that is worth the struggle in the first place–our happy, unique, value-rich communities.

And this is a very powerful thing worth protecting.

Republican Pat McGeehan is a six-term state delegate from Hancock County. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Pat holds a master’s degree in Philosophy from Franciscan University of Steubenville and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Duquesne University. He resides in Chester.