{"id":2547,"date":"2008-05-09T12:35:31","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T17:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2547"},"modified":"2008-05-09T11:04:14","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T16:04:14","slug":"conservative-is-better-part-mmmcmlvi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2547","title":{"rendered":"Conservative Is Better, Part MMMCMLVI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up in North Dakota, there was a palpable sense that you could still feel the panic of the Great Depression; some nooks and crannies in downtown Jamestown still had grit from the Dust Bowl tucked away into back corners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tied to agriculture as it has always been, it’s always been a fairly conservative place (although the friction and turbulence of agriculture have also made it the hotbed of extremists of all types – it was the home of the leftist Grange movement in the 1890’s, as well as Bill Langer and the “Non-Partisan League” in the thirties; it was also a hotbed of the Deutsche-Amerikanische Bund<\/em> in the thirties and the Posse Comitatus in the seventies and eightes.\u00a0 But they were very much the outliers).\u00a0 It’s voted Republican, if memory serves, in every election since statehood.\u00a0 Even in the Democrat landslides; North Dakota\u00a0(and its cheap copy, South\u00a0Dakota)\u00a0gives Utah and Nevada a run for their money.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that conservatism springs from a life that is by its very nature pretty conservative; Kathleen Norris, in her classic book Dakota:\u00a0 A Spiritual Geography<\/em> says that people who thrive in the Dakotas have an attitude not unlike that of monks – self-denying, humble-to-the-point-of-self-abasing, penurious, expecting very little.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had <\/em>to get out of there.<\/p>\n

But the place has its attractions.\u00a0 One of them being just about the strongest economy in the nation<\/a>, right about now:<\/p>\n

\u00a0While almost a quarter-million California properties were involved last year, South Dakota had only 50 homes in foreclosure in 2007, a nearly imperceptible 0.007 percent of homes in the state, the New York Times reported. Nevada’s nation-leading rate was 3.4 percent, but North Dakota was below 0.1 percent, along with Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rick Clayburgh, president of the North Dakota Bankers Association in Bismarck, offered similar explanations for his state’s escaping the subprime fallout.<\/p>\n

Farmers received record prices for a bumper wheat crop and other commodities. The Williston Basin oil patch is booming. The Canadian dollar’s strength against the U.S. dollar has fueled tourism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“But nobody wants to live there…”<\/p>\n

Well, duh, yeah, you Rhodes scholar you…:<\/p>\n

“States like North Dakota and South Dakota are not exactly retirement destinations,” [Curt Everson of the SoDak Banker’s Association] said from his office in Pierre. “That’s what drove the housing boom in Nevada and some of those other places.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But still; the Dakotas have ridden out the last two recessions and <\/em>the ongoing decay in the agriculture business (forget about ethanol; the Dakotas are dry and windy, which makes for\u00a0lousy <\/em>corn country) much better than the nation as a whole.\u00a0 This is a departure from history (especially when I was growing up there), and a direct result of a very conservative style of government.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which makes sense, more or less.<\/p>\n

And before some nutslap chimes in with Paul Krugman’s incontinent blather about the Dakotas getting more “aid” than they pay in taxes, just stop.\u00a0 While much of that aid is in farm subsidies (and I’ve opposed them for over 20 years now), much of the rest of it is in federal land ownership (the feds own about 5% of both states), military spending (the states host three Air Force bases and about 150 Minuteman missile silos – down from 450 during th eighties), big federal land and water projects, and several Indian reservations.\u00a0 All that money, against a combined population of about 1.3 million, skews the “aid” numbers to the point that you’d have to be as addled as Paul Krugman to present them out of context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up in North Dakota, there was a palpable sense that you could still feel the panic of the Great Depression; some nooks and crannies in downtown Jamestown still had grit from the Dust Bowl tucked away into back corners.\u00a0 Tied to agriculture as it has always been, it’s always been a fairly conservative place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midwest","category-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}