The Texan Economic Model
There is the old joke about the Texan rancher visiting a distant relative who still farms in England. Having been shown around said bulldogs farm (& there are those that to this day believe that the farm in question actually belonged to The Englishman), the rancher announces that it takes him all day to drive from one side of his ranch to the other, to which the farmer replies that he too once had a tractor like that.
As regular readers guessed, last week saw your humble correspondent managing to tack a couple of days vacation onto his business trip to the States & stay with the Du Toits, at the Nation of Riflemen’s super secretive Texas compound. Rest assured dear readers, there are several gun posts to come (no surprises there then) but while my current laptop issues persist posting has been a little lighter than I would like it to be. However in the interim, here are a few impressions gleaned from my visit.
The thing that strikes you driving north from Dallas is the sheer scale of development that is taking place there. Where not so long ago were small towns & by local standards, little ranches, there are now business parks, mall developments & new homes. We are talking about an area of land that is probably in excess of 200 square miles.
Despite what our own socialist control freak government would have you believe, this scale of new economic activity isn’t being driven by taxpayer funded inward investment agencies … it is in fact a result of a distinct lack of government: this development results from a low tax business friendly environment & the knowledge that if you create the right economic conditions, the market will work in your favour. Put in some infrastructure, the six lane suburban highways are the size of our motorways & what is loosely known as the market will do the rest for you. Before you know it, major corporations will have relocated, other smaller business will have sprung up & developers will be building new homes as fast as they can because people, the best sort of people, economically active people, will be moving to the area to fill all of the new jobs that have been created.
Compare that if you will to the UK’s approach. Instead of trusting individuals to want to do what is best for themselves & allowing businesses to create shareholder value, it has for the last ten years approached job creation & the generation of economic activity in a slightly different fashion. Our Government’s view is that the way ahead is to tie up businesses in an ever more complex regulatory environment & increasingly oppressive taxation regime. Then, as levels of employment & business activity inevitably fall, the Government can step in to create new ‘taskforces’ to try & sort things out – the majority of new employment created being in Nu Labour voting civil service jobs.
& don’t even get me started on the argument that in the UK we simply don’t have the land to achieve that sort of new development. We have so much land in Britain that the taxpayer is in the position to subsidies farmers to the tune of many billions of pounds a year to do nothing with their land because it is no longer required for food production. The underlying principle of this policy is also mirrored in our attitude to immigration where we are consistently told that we have serve skills shortages that are adversely impacting upon the Country’s competitiveness. Therefore we now have the luxury of importing lots of unskilled & non English speaking workers, just so that the taxpayer can give them our money in the form of absurd levels of social security handouts. Much better that than to create an environment where the private sector can thrive & families can get on with life without constant recourse to our increasingly hydra-headed government.
Comments
Of couse England is this way, it is either a socialist, or more likely a fascist state, so far neither has flourished in this universe.
Posted by: chris Edwards | April 15, 2008 5:58 PM