Conservatives believe in the free market. But the free market only works when everyone is held accountable for their actions, and in the Cape Fear River Valley, that accountability never came.

For decades, Chemours' Fayetteville Works plant discharged PFAS, synthetic "forever chemicals" that don't break down in the environment or the human body, into the Cape Fear River, the drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of people downstream. Today, more than 75 percent of sampled private wells in parts of New Hanover County exceed federal health standards for these chemicals. Residents drank contaminated water for years without knowing it. Their property values, their wells, their health, all assets they earned and owned, were quietly degraded by a neighbor who never asked permission and never paid a price.

That is not how a free market is supposed to work. When a business externalizes its costs onto private citizens, it isn't competing; it's cheating. The foundational conservative principle isn't just that markets should be free; it's that they must be fair. That means every actor bears the true cost of what they do. Chemours didn't. Instead, those costs were passed directly to taxpayers.

Responsible businesses have always had a role in protecting the environment, and most take that seriously because it makes long-term economic sense. Clean water means a healthy workforce, thriving property values, and a coast that keeps drawing the tourism and investment this region depends on. The companies that get that are assets to Wilmington. What happened here wasn't a failure of business; it was one company refusing to be accountable for its own bottom line.

The math is now visible. Governor Stein recently announced $17 million in state grants just to extend water lines to more than 300 homes with contaminated wells in New Hanover County. That money came from North Carolina taxpayers, ordinary people underwriting the cleanup bill for a corporation that spent years ducking it. When private accountability collapses like this, the government inevitably fills the gap, and the bill lands on working families. If you want less government spending, make sure wrongdoers foot the bill in the first place.

Last November, Wilmington's city council voted unanimously to oppose Chemours expanding its Fayetteville Works plant. This spring, a public hearing on proposed state PFAS rules packed a venue past fire marshal capacity. The community understands what's at stake. The question is whether conservatives frame this story correctly or cede it to the left by staying silent.

What happened here was a broken accountability chain. A company harmed its neighbors, escaped the consequences, and left working families and taxpayers to absorb the damage. Demanding that Chemours own those costs isn't an expansion of the regulatory state; it's the most basic requirement of a functioning market: you break it, you buy it.

The Cape Fear River belongs to this community. The wells on private property belong to the families who own them. Conservatives should be the loudest voices insisting those things be made whole, and that the company responsible, not the taxpayer, writes the check.