New York Times: Better To Be Jobless Than To Live In North Dakota

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Written By:
Rob Port

Jul 27, 2012
9:55am

At this point, stories about the Bakken oil boom are starting to get sort of boring for North Dakotans. The novelty in seeing our oft-ignored state covered in the national media in a positive way, for a growing economy instead of god-awful weather or some natural disaster, has begun to wear off. It seems like every week or so some reporter or commentator from the national media covers the jobs. The lack of housing. The traffic.

Maybe some are just waking up to what’s going on here, but we in North Dakota have been living with it for a while. It’s old hat.

But I had to laugh when I read this column from the New York Times’ Gail Collins who apparently visited the oil patch recently and was left notably cold by the lack of upscale restaurants.

“If the place you love can’t quite climb out of the recession, think of this as consolation,” she writes. “At least you’re not living in a man camp and waiting half an hour in line for a Big Mac.”

Yes. Much better to be jobless than to be self-sufficient and forced to eat at McDonald’s or Applebee’s or something.

I’m not even sure why Collins came to North Dakota. If food snobbery, along with the sort of cliched reporting we’re getting about the oil patch every day, is all she had to offer she could just as well of stayed in New York and looked down her nose at us from there.

This Times column comes on top of a lengthy Washington Post hit piece from last week and relentlessly negative coverage from other media outlets. It seems, in a lot of ways, that the Bakken oil boom has really gotten under some people’s skin. Maybe because the economic growth and prosperity the boom is driving isn’t happening the way they think it’s supposed to happen.

There are no government economic development projects. There’s no stimulus projects. There’s little here for politicians to take credit for at all (which isn’t to say they aren’t trying).

It’s the free market at work, it’s individuals lifting themselves through their own hard work, and they hate it.