Rural Texas is generally not a place where we look for advice, but perhaps it should be.
A recent commentary in The Amarillo Globe-News caught our eye because the problems it describes sound so similar to the ones we find in rural Virginia. The writer bemoans the population exodus from rural counties as the economy finds more and more reasons to create jobs in metro areas and fewer reasons to create them in rural communities.
âThat rural exodus has come at a cost,â the writer says. âAs people have moved away to the urban areas, the lifeblood of many smaller Texas communities has been eroded. Fewer residents mean a shrinking tax base to pay for roads, schools, law enforcement, first responders, and sometimes even the local hospital or community college.
18 Jan 2021
A group of “free-market and low-tax advocates” are urging House Republicans to back off plans to take antitrust action against Big Tech companies.
The
Washington Timesreported the “conservative activists” authored a 10-page letter to Republican U.S. Reps. Ken Buck (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), and Andy Biggs (AZ) and it said in part:
We fear that today, both sides of the aisle are pushing for the weaponization of antitrust, either as a tool to punish corporate actors with whom they disagree or out of a presupposition that big is bad.
Unfortunately, the antitrust debate has begun to devolve into a litany of unrelated and often contradictory concerns, unsubstantiated and dismissive attacks, and seemingly a presumption that any market-related complaint that can be made on the internet can also be cured by the panacea of antitrust.