The Newspaper Headline

Like every good Texan, as I grew up, I both knew of and actively participated in the rivalry between Fort Worth (good) and Dallas (evil).   Usually, the rivalry took the form of jokes and the occasional high school football games, but occasionally you heard stories about how both cities competed in attracting new businesses.

The rivalry started almost a century and a half ago, when a lawyer heard that a railroad was about to lay tracks to the then tiny village of Fort Worth.  The lawyer quickly relocated, hoping to prosper as the village grew.  Unfortunately, the railroad changed its mind and decided against laying tracks to the town, so the lawyer moved to Dallas where he wrote an article for the Dallas Daily Herald stating that there was so little activity in his former home that a panther had wandered into the village at noon and had taken a nap in the middle of Main Street.  For weeks, said the lawyer, the chief topic of conversation in Fort Worth was to point at the middle of the thoroughfare and say, “He slept rite thar.”

In the end, Fort Worth had the last laugh, since not only did the railroad eventually come to the town, but the community gleefully adopted the panther as its mascot.  Early in the twentieth century, Amon Carter, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, used the panther as the paper’s logo.  Carter, an enthusiastic booster of his city, supposedly always packed a lunch when business forced him to visit Dallas, so that he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel in that city.  It was Carter who labeled Fort Worth as “Where the West Begins,” a slogan that still appears on the masthead of his paper.  The paper did not print the rest of the phrase, “Dallas, where the East peters out.”

Today, I live in a New Mexico town that has an ongoing rivalry with a city just 40 miles away, just across the border in Texas.  As businesses flee the heavy taxes and extensive regulations of California, they are relocating across almost al of the Southwest.  Almost all southwest states and cities are eagerly competing to bring home new jobs to boost their economies and expand their tax bases.  Unfortunately, New Mexico is not part of the competition.  

Businesses are definitely flocking to cities in Texas.  Every time I drive south across the border, I’m amazed at all the new businesses and warehouses being built along the interstate.  Unfortunately, the new construction dramatically stops at the state line, heading back north, into New Mexico.

Have you seen the satellite photos of night lights in North and South Korea?  South Korea is ablaze in lights, but North Korea is as dark as the grave, with only a dim glow around Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.  Unfortunately, the satellite photo of the New Mexico/Texas border is starting to share some of the same characteristics.  The photo at left shows the two communities separated by the state border.  The long line leading south and north of the brighter city is Interstate 10.  The red arrow points to the point where the interstate reaches the New Mexico border—the point where almost all commercial activity simply stops.

Businesses are highly unlikely to move to New Mexico for some very simple reasons.  This is a closed shop state with very strong labor laws favoring unions, despite the fact that the only large unions in the state are for school teachers and public employees.  California and New Mexico are the only closed shop states in the southwest:  the rest are right-to-work states, and all of those have expanding industrial bases.  It doesn’t seem to be a hard test, but it seems clear that our state is flunking.

New Mexico has relatively high business taxes, extensive anti-business regulations, and a state legislature so unstable that if a lobbyist spent $50 on an advertising campaign, the state would repeal the law of gravity.  These conditions are unlikely to attract new businesses, despite the state’s having an educated workforce, a low cost of living, cheap land, and great access to transportation.  The state also shares with California the dubious distinction of having run off a number of good-sized, well-established businesses.  Some of those formerly New Mexican businesses have relocated just across the border in Texas (and one even took its employees with it—a further loss to the tax base of a state that had no excess tax base to lose).  It is becoming increasingly obvious that the most valuable export from this state is not pecans or green chile: it is our college graduates, who have been educated at state expense and who must leave the state to find good-paying jobs they cannot find here.

All of the above came to mind this week as I read the local newspaper.  While cities across the southwest are competing for new industry, at right is a front page headline from one of the largest cities in New Mexico.   Happily, the city has a new tattoo parlor that must employ two or three people.  Now, all our problems are solved.

Hey!  Did you hear that a coyote wandered out of the desert into town and took a nap on Main Street?  He was rite thar.