With the advent of Texas governor Rick Perry in the GOP Presidential race, there has been a lot of talk about the large number of jobs created in Texas v. the rest of the country. Much of the liberal critique of Perry (Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias) is finally reflecting my 2005 analysis of Texas v. California, The Dirt Gap. Hey, it doesn’t have much to do with Perry, it has to do with there being a lot of land in Texas, and not much environmental regulation, so housing prices are cheap!

A couple of additional Texas themes of mine that may become conventional wisdom in, oh, a half dozen years are.

• The bad news for Democrats from the Texas experiment is that it suggests that driving down the skill level of the population through mass immigration means that the only affordable, feasible kind of government in a future heavily mestizo America is a low tax - low spend - low regulation - conservative value Texas-style Republicanism.
• The bad news for Republicans out of Texas is that just such policies attract in so many immigrants and encourage so much fertility among immigrants that the Republicans will eventually get swamped demographically.