Elnora H. and William B. Quarton Professor of Business Administration and Economics, Coe College, Iowa
A Trip to Texas, 1/5/2023
We just came back from a vacation in Texas. It is an amazing place. After seeing it myself, I believe the gravity center of the country has gradually moved from the coasts to the southwest. We toured the four major cities - Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. All of them are vibrant young cities with conspicuous expansions going on. The weather is not as good as in California, but it certainly beats the Midwest!
People in Texas are casual. Californians are casual, too, but still seem to have some kind of fashion that chic people need to conform to. Texans are literally ignorant of what other people think! I didn’t see any open carry, but I guess I wasn’t in the rural parts of the state. Speaking of rural areas, we didn’t see truly rural areas, those uncultivated lands with few dwellings that you can easily see in Oklahoma and Kansas, along the triangle. When we entered Texas from Oklahoma, the landscape remained the same, but economic development seemed to be on a different level. Of course, Oklahoma has great cities, too. We stopped by Tulsa on our way back. It is well developed and vibrant. But Texas is just different.
Texas has a unique history. We were at the State Capitol and the Alamo. I haven’t seen so much discussion of “Revolution” since visiting Philadelphia. But the Revolution is not about 1776. It was about the one in 1836. The heroes are not the founding fathers, but Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. I especially like Crokett’s words-“You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”-when he defended the Alamo.
Being a once independent republic gives Texas the one-of-a-kind pride, but also enshrines the value of freedom above everything else. This is the true reason I believe Texas will overtake California as the largest state in the union in the near future. The land is vast and the population is numerous, but liberty is the real magnet that will draw people in. Houston looks like a mess if you ask any urban planner, but it just keeps growing. When the city’s growth is not hindered by bureaucrats, it blossoms into a beautiful flower. Everyone finds their own happy corner in Houston. It even has an ocean nearby. Galveston is only half an hour away. Who needs California? Well, I might have to come back in summer to be fair to both states!
There were some observations that flashed big red warnings. Austin might be “a blueberry in the tomato soup”, but the blueberry is full of foul smell. It is a young city with many opportunities, but homeless people gathering under the overpass give you the San Francisco feeling. It is not a compliment.
The biggest disappointment is the Perot Museum in Dallas. With Perot’s money and reputation, the Museum gave me high hope. I was looking for great exhibitions for science and engineering, but found a big letdown. DEI people have hijacked the organization. I wanted to see great science achievements, but they showed me stuff you see in children’s museums. I wanted to see North Texas’s contribution to technology, but Texas Instrument and Ross Perot were only given a tiny space. It is good to profile ordinary people to show young kids about possible careers, but they are not inspiring. Kids can get these types of talks from their relatives and friends. They visit a museum to see great, inspiring things. I wondered to myself what I would have done in a museum like that. I would have bought a Tesla, tore it apart, used tech to demonstrate what’s behind each great innovation in the car, let kids fiddle with the parts with VR headsets, and showed them what could be ahead of an EV feature. That will be inspiring. No, they did none of that. Even the Pixar exhibition was dull.
Perot Museum aside, the whole trip was just amazing. We tasted plenty of Texas BBQ and tons of Asian foods. Seriously, who needs to visit California when you can get a Texas-size treatment in the free Republic of Texas?
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