In the early twentieth century, agriculture-dominated North Dakota was swept by a populist agrarian movement borne of farmers sick of watching bankers and railroad bosses take advantage of their work and run amok with their savings. That agrarian movement produced two entities that are still flourishing over 100 years later – a state-owned grain mill, which has become the largest grain mill in the United States, and a public bank that ensured North Dakota would be unaffected by the recession of 2008 that rocked the other 49 states and the rest of the world.... The bank didn’t engage in the risky derivatives trading that crashed the rest of the financial sector in the late 2000s, and its executives are state employees that earn a respectable but not excessive salary, and are thus not incentivized to make high-risk bets with deposits to enrich themselves.Jacksonians generally hate state banks, but it's hard to argue with the 115 year record of success by the grain mill. It's the largest in the country, but not a monopoly as you might suspect: it grinds only 10% of the grain in North Dakota.
North Dakota, Socialist Paradise
Well, it's an interesting argument, anyway.
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That's odd, because Jackson insisted on state banks. That was his answer to the national bank, which he killed.
Here's the Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bank_of_the_United_States
I think your article says that Jackson diverted the holdings of the 2nd US Bank to selected private banks, which is what I had understood. However, if Jackson was in fact good with state (but not Federal) banks, all the better. It was a weak objection: that Jackson had opposed the 2nd US Bank may not tell us much about whether we ought to oppose a Bank of Georgia today.
Sorry, my error. It was selected private banks.
I'm not sure why I thought it was state banks.
From the article: The word “socialism” is often thrown around by those who least understand it as a way to criticize left-leaning economic reforms. In essence, socialism is simply a collective group of people stepping in to fill a niche and provide goods and services when the only other options are too expensive or too inefficient.
Wal-Mart would seem to fit this definition well. I suspect he needs to add "government" in there somewhere.
North Dakota has the largest percentage of Norwegians in its population of any state in the Union. It's a peculiarity of Norwegians, especially of the immigration era (the couple of decades either side of 1900) that they tended to combine religious pietism and revivalism with progressive politics. This is because the party that first brought the vote to the people in Norway was the "Venstre" (Left) Party, founded by members of the Haugean religious revival movement. It was in many ways a beautiful moment in social history. The Venstre Party was eventually taken over by socialists and atheists, and embraced statism. The Haugeans moved to the Christian Democratic Party.
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