Back in February, the Deep End featured a post entitled Sweden: Beacon of the right. Today, we look to a rather more obvious source of inspiration: the Lone Star State of Texas.
Writing for the Dallas Morning News, Erica Grieder contends that talk of a ‘Texas miracle’ is no exaggeration:
Furthermore, this isn’t just due to the geological accident of rich resource endowment. In the past, one could have dismissed Texas as “a resource colony — America’s leading provider of cotton and cattle, soldiers and oil”, but no longer. 21st century Texas is a dynamic knowledge-based economy, capable of creating large numbers of well-paid jobs.
All of which is bit embarrassing for American liberals. After all, how can a state that elects governors like George W Bush and Rick Perry, be doing so well? Surely, there’s much less to the Texas miracle than meets the eye.
Erica Grieder decided to find out for herself, and has a book out on the subject Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas. This is what she concluded:
We’ll come on to these tweaks in a bit; but, first, what is the Texas model?
That’s all pretty straightforward, but success – a young and growing population in a skills-hungry economy – is presenting new demands:
But there’s a big difference between state-led investment in the ‘infrastructure of opportunity’ and the public sector feather-bedding that is bankrupting other parts of the United States. Even if up-and-coming Democrats like Joaquín Castro succeed in winning Texas back from Republican rule, Grieder is convinced that the state will “remain on the fiscally conservative side of the spectrum”:
Fiscal conservatism is sometimes dismissed as a hard-hearted ideology of the hard right, but actually it is something much wider and deeper than that. Texas shows that it is a state of mind, embracing values of self-reliance, but also a shared and selfless loyalty to a culture conscious not only of its past and present, but its future too.
To borrow and spend without thought of repayment represents the opposite state of mind, one which, implicitly or explicitly, gives up on the future. More than a matter of fiscal irresponsibility, it is an act of cultural suicide.