A look at Wyoming's economic history and government spending

Today's Tribune has an article by Samuel Western on the history of government spending in Wyoming, entitled:

Western: Big government has been a staple of the Wyoming economy since territorial time

It's a really interesting read.

I'll note that this is a compliment coming from me in that I have sort of a visceral reaction to Sam Western in the first place, and not in a positive way.  I frankly regard him in the category of annoying carpetbagger full of unwanted advice.

That's harsh and may be completely unwarranted, but as a Wyoming native, sooner or later you'll feel that way about something.  We tend to be constantly enduring East Coasters who have no connection to the state moving in and offering advice on how to convert the state into the blight they just fled, or temporary residents who moved into from the country's other oil provinces who are full of opinions on how the state is just like wherever they left or should be.  I don't know that Western, whom I put in the first category, deserve that feeling on my part but I tend to feel that way about him in part because of his book Pushed Off The Mountain Sold Down The River, which I admittedly have not read but which my mother was a fanatic fan of.

Western has a lot of opinions about Wyoming's economy and has managed to go from being a writer as The Economist to being regarded as as local author. I don't regard him as a local author so much as I regard him as somebody whose means or remote occupation allowed him to relocate to someplace else, which isn't like being from the region, or anywhere else for that matter, and relocating due to work.  So, suffice it to say, I'm predisposed to disregard Western.

Be that as it may, his Tribune article points out what Wyomingites simply hate to acknowledge, which is that we're a big government state and always have been.  This goes all the way back to the state's beginning, and at first, because our politics were significantly different than they are now, we were quite comfortable with that.  He might not quite grasp the reasons for that, or perhaps he's unaware of the history of it, but Wyoming was a Republican state early on, just like it is now, but in an era when the GOP was the liberal party.  While the state's typically been too cheap to fund much of what it tries to create, early on the state was "progressive" in the original sense of the word when the Democrats were conservatives who looked back to the ante bellum era to a large degree.

Western's point, I think, is that this impacts the state today, which it does.  But one thing I think he misses, somewhat, is the degree to which that history simply isn't grasped, even though it leaves a large legacy, and the extent to which some current residents claim an imagined historical and political heritage that's actually quite contrary to the actual one.  In our current election year, for example, candidates like Hageman, Haynes or Barrasso who argue for turning land over to the state government are really taking a position that's contrary to the actual Wyoming one, at least historically, in terms of its view.  Or put another way, they're sort of on what would have been regarded as the loosing side of history for much of Wyoming's history, on that sort of thing.