The Outstater
On Chasing our Fancies
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell
I HAVE IN FRONT OF ME the latest census figures showing net migration in and out of the states. Indiana is about in the middle with a gain of 4,500 new “citizens.” That is where we usually are on any chart — about in the middle. We seem happy with that.
This aspect of the Hoosier character is difficult to understand. Why wouldn’t we want to be up there with Texas and the Carolinas, Georgia even? Arizona? It used to be a joke about selling oceanfront property. Now it’s a people magnet.
“Sure, weather matters but does it explain South Dakota attracting people and Hawaii losing them?” asks the columnist Richard Hanania of the new census figures.
A friend, also looking at the numbers, had this insight: “South Dakota is beautiful but it’s not Hawaii, so people migrate where they feel safe and there is economic mobility. The sad part is the poor have a harder time moving and are stuck in the states where they live.”
There is cross tabulation that deserves attention, specifically a clear and continuing tendency of people moving out of liberal states. This is a big deal, the most important set of information in economics — how many people are coming and how many are going. And please know that these aren’t just any people, these are people (some of whom own companies) with the means to escape crime and its enabling policies, people who will pay taxes and foster prosperity elsewhere.
They are not buying the idea that melanin count should derail thousands of years of Western Civilization. It is a fine thing to worry about your fellow man. It is something else to allow him to burn down a city because a prosecutor or mayor cannot abide racially disproportionate arrests.
For that very reason the Blue states are failed states. Mixing sociological theory with law and order turns out to be a recipe for cataclysm. At some point you have to quit worrying about why an armed rapist’s great-grandmother had a baby out of wedlock to qualify for food stamps and just put him in jail regardless. The same for the pampered, unemployable social-Marxist humanities major living in your neighbor’s basement sewing Hamas headbands.
Here is where Indiana has an opportunity. Our state still has enough clear-headed citizens who know how to fix this, that is, to elect and to appoint judges and prosecutors determined to restore the founding principles. That means respect for the individual, respect for private property and an acceptance of the responsibilities of liberty.
If we could convince our ruling class of that, Indiana would zoom ahead, and a careful reading of “America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding” might do the trick. This exhaustively researched work by Robert Reilly (Notre Dame) concludes on an optimistic note:
“We can avoid the cataclysm anytime we choose to, by returning to reality, to reason, to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Reality is resilient because, as Plato said, it is what is — not whatever one fancies. Logos wins in the end.”
Our “fancies” are what sounded good — equality of results, endless reparation, diversity for diversity’s sake, etc. They have ruled long enough. Will Indiana realize that before reality strikes us down as it has other states?
I would like to think so. But then again, we elected Eric Holcomb not once but twice. — tcl
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