Small-towns are the casualties of globalism. Industries have been shuttered. Big government, meaning both sides of the aisle, have failed America. Just take a look around on your next road trip.
Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, explains in the WSJ’s Weekend Interview why he had students visit a failed middle America town: “I wanted the students to go to a place that had experienced industrial decline,” he says. “And they came back with a clear sense that there’s no silver bullet to our problems, but that people there had real points—that a lot of what you read about their lives is true.” There are, he continues, “real economic concerns in the heartland, but also concerns about dignity that neither party had addressed.”
Today, when my family drives to New Hampshire we pass through small town after small town that has been left behind. Small towns cannot compete with globalism. And now thanks to the synthetic opioid fentanyl and free flowing heroin, they have become drug havens.
“While Appalachia and the Northeast have been hardest hit by the new opioids, the upper Midwest is also reeling. On the other side of a bridge from Superior, in northern Minnesota, police working for a tri-county task force have intercepted 64.5 grams of fentanyl so far in the third quarter, enough of the deadly narcotic to kill 32,000 people, up from 12 grams in the second quarter,” reports Jeanne Whalen at the WSJ. “Officials in and around Fargo, N.D., are grappling with a rash of fentanyl-related overdoses this year, including among high-school students who were snorting the drug through nasal-spray bottles.”
