Hat tip to Williams:
I am a big fan of Houston. It has low taxes, cheap housing, few regulations, and it is far more healthy– spiritually-speaking– than any other city of its size. It’s got a lot of random quirks and interesting mom-and-pop stores and restaurants, despite what you might think after driving through on the freeways.
Houston, while far from some perfect mecca of free market principles over its history, is one of the greatest examples of how policies matter. It’s one of the rare big cities in America that is growing not just with foreign immigrants but with domestic migration as well.
Think of Houston as a microcosm of America. It’s diverse. It’s thriving, due to low taxes, relatively few regulations, and a reasonable cost of living. It’s fairly “small-l” libertarian yet simultaneously a city of faith. Most of all, there’s a healthy spirit of “live and let live” in Houston. Mind your own business, and let everyone else mind theirs. That permeates every facet of life, including government.
This “leave us alone” spirit is why some of us view the modern left as such a sinister force today. While some on the right would certainly like to play bedroom police and dabble in regulating morality, it is the left that truly wishes to penetrate every aspect of life with its collectivist, nanny-state takings coalition run from Washington, D.C.
Here’s a map from The American from which Will Franklin at Williams got his information. I have edited the map to alos show the “red state - blue state” voting patters from the 2004 national election.
Now let’s look at the opposite side of this equation:
If Houston is a microcosm of the Republican America, Detroit is the Democratic America.
The way I see it, there are a few options, here:
1. Impose Republican America on the entire country.
2. Let Republican America do its thing and Democratic America do its thing. Eventually, there’ll be a winner.
3. Impose Democratic America on the entire country.I tend to believe that FDR threw us into number 3. Eisenhower moved us back to 2. LBJ moved us back to 3, and we’re only sort of back to 2 thanks to Reagan and George W. Bush.
Believe it or not, I am not for number 1. I believe there is a place in America for San Francisco and Aspen and Vermont. I just believe they all should be responsible for their own long-term problems. And that they’ll eventually choose option 1 when they lose all of their productive people.
Unfortunately, today’s Democratic Party is firmly encamped in choice number 3 (option 2 is antithetical to an ideology that advocates centralization and equality above liberty), and today’s Republican Party is mostly within the second option (if only because it is hard to impose things like “small government” on others). That means the center of gravity is actually somewhere between numbers 2 and 3. That’s a problem.
Let’s hope the continued growth of places like Houston is the solution.
