Joel Kotkin

Post image for North Dakota’s Lessons for America

Not every State is suffering economically.  According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Joel Kotkin,  unemployment in North Dakota is 3.8 percent (nation-wide, it’s about 9 percent), due primarily to increasing production of oil and gas. And, as noted by Bonner Cohen in a letter to the Journal, North Dakota’s energy boom was made possible primarily because almost all of North Dakota’s rich deposits of oil and natural gas lie beneath privately-owned land. Otherwise, it would have been locked up by the Obama administration.