Freedom Reigns: Still No Stopping the Texas Economy

Wendell Cox’s new report, 2013 Metropolitan Area Population Estimates, is the latest confirmation that Paul Krugman and other liberal critics of the Texas Model are wrong; Texas has far and away the most dynamic economy in the United States.

For example:

Late in the last decade, Dallas-Fort Worth passed Philadelphia to become the fourth largest metropolitan area. Then, Philadelphia was passed by Houston in 2011. The result is that, for the first time since the nation’s founding, two of the five largest cities (which are functionally defined as metropolitan areas) are in a single state (Texas).

Here are the leaders in population growth from 2010 to 2013:

The four Texas major metropolitan areas are all in the top seven, in large part because people are coming here from all over the country:

Of course, this begs the question: why does everyone want to live in Texas? To help us answer the question, here is some information about where people don’t want to live:

Texas, Florida, Colorado, and Arizona are in; New York, Illinois, and California are out. Why? Well, it turns out that the four “in states” are in Forbes’ top five states for future job growth:

So people want to live in Texas because there are jobs here. There is still one question left, though; why are all the jobs showing up in these states? Because people pay less tax in these states than in the states where the people—and the jobs—are leaving:

Here is another way of looking at it when comparing Texas with California and the rest of the states in the U.S.: the states with more jobs and more people have smaller governments that interfere less with the people who live there:

Our country was founded on the principles of freedom; in particular on individual liberty, which was a new concept when it came to governance. As the Texas Model shows, the experiment in freedom has worked. Freedom and individual liberty are not just the morally correct way of governing, they are also the best practical way of doing so.