Saturday, April 17, 2021

Appalachian Serenade

 

For at least the past decade, New Hampshire has been attracting conservative and libertarian-minded individuals from the Northeast, through the Free State Project and personal initiative. Strong gun rights, no state income tax, and boundless opportunities for rugged outdoor activities provide the incentives. The Granite State’s rural areas vote Democratic, while the more educated and urbanized southern part of New Hampshire, closest to Boston, prefer Republicans. This inversion of modern political trends can also be found in another mountainous state: West Virginia.

Lest anyone forget, West Virginia was a solidly Democratic state until Al Gore and John Kerry were nominated by the Democratic Party in 2000 and 2004. A legacy of coal-field patronage and low-wage labor resulted in a highly-unionized workforce and economically progressive politics. Until Obama’s “War on Coal”, it was unthinkable that West Virginia would make efforts to appease the staunch Republican appendage of the Eastern Panhandle, closest to Washington, DC. It already had competitive advantages in being home to the states’ highest average incomes, federal employment, two interstate highways, and a commuter rail line. But nobody can bring back coal: Virginia’s recent elimination of a coal production tax credit, which was was cut for economically ineffectiveness (the environmental reasons are still too touchy to mention), was but one signal that coal is dead or dying, and that clear minds needed to create a new strategy for economic growth in Appalachia.

West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice (himself a Democrat turned Republican) passed a Right-to-Work bill, once unthinkable in a strong labor state. More interestingly, he has proposed eliminating the state’s income tax. Just west of Washington Dulles International Airport, the freeway splits. The left turn is for Route 7 /Harry Byrd Highway, into the prosperous horse-and-wine country, which is also growing as suburban bedroom communities. The right turn for Route 9 is the road less travelled. The narrow, meandering road heads into the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, which lies directly north and parallel to Route 7. Using radically pro-growth policies, and seizing on the current political turmoil and stagnant growth in non-metropolitan Virginia, Governor Jim Justice’s goal is to make his road the more travelled road. The experience of New Hampshire shows this to be a real possibility.

 

 

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