Читать книгу Texas Got It Right! - Sam Wyly - Страница 14

signed by, among others, another great-great-uncle of

mine, Christopher A. Parker, before he became one of

the 187 heroes of the Alamo in 1836. We remember

the grit of Texas’s first settlers—dirt farmers who

scratched a living out of the hard earth and laid the

foundation for the Lone Star Nation. We remember

the great cotton and lumber barons who helped turn

our towns into cities, and we remember when that

first oil well at Spindletop blew in East Texas in 1901,

ushering the age of cars and planes and launching a

thousand fortunes. We remember the crash of the

1980s, too, when so many of those Texas oil fortunes

went belly-up and new fifty-story skyscrapers in Dallas

and Houston remained “see-through” empty buildings

for ten years.

Those were tough times for Texans, but we’re

optimists by nature—probably the most stubbornly

optimistic people on earth. We see opportunity

where others see disaster. In 1987, when real estate

here collapsed after oil dropped from $40 per barrel

to $9, I moved my company, Sterling Software, across

the street to a half-vacant building rent-free for two

years. Our three companies came out of those hard

times just fine. Texas did, too.

That’s because Texans aren’t afraid to fail. And

when we do, we don’t beg for taxpayer bailouts. Just

ask Richard Fisher, the head of the Dallas Fed. He’s

been preaching against “too big to fail” for years now,

a voice of Main Street common sense in a room full

of East Coast policy wonks. He looks back on the

1980s S&L crisis in Texas and sees survivors that

came out stronger and leaner and ready to grow.

Today Texas banks outperform the rest of the nation’s

banks fivefold, and our pioneers’ homestead laws,

which protect citizens from predatory creditors,

helped Texans avoid the subprime mess. Fisher—who

is trying to instill Lone Star fiscal responsibility in

The Spanish, French, and British Empires of North America,

1776. Texas was instrumental in successively pushing the great

European empires off the continent.

TEXAS GOT IT RIGHT!

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