In this book, we identify key areas for Mississippi economic policy reform. Twenty-one scholars, ten of which are from or work in Mississippi, have contributed original policy research. All twenty chapters were written specifically for Mississippi with a shared goal to promote prosperity in the state. While some of the chapters contain complex policy reforms, we have made every effort to present the concepts and ideas in a way that is understandable to the average citizen, the person who can benefit the most from this information. The first three chapters of the text summarize the basic economic principles necessary to achieve economic prosperity. These three chapters present the principles behind the reforms proposed in the subsequent seventeen chapters. Each chapter was written independently and offers unique insight into different areas of state policy reform. While the topics covered range from tax reform, education reform, healthcare, corporate welfare, occupational licensing and business regulatory reform to criminal justice reform, and natural disaster recovery efforts, there is a clear unifying framework underlying the conclusions reached in each chapter. The theme throughout is that economic growth is best achieved through free market policies, policies which are based on limited government, lower regulations, lower taxes, minimal infringement on contracting and labor markets, secure private property rights, low subsidies, and privatization. Policy based on these principles allows Mississippians to have more rights and more choices in their lives.

Winner of the 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the 2023 UMW Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize For over eighty years, tourists have flocked to Natchez, Mississippi, seeking the “Old South,” but what they encounter is invention: a pageant and rewrite of history first concocted during the Great Depression. In Heritage and Hoop Skirts: How Natchez Created the Old South, author Paul Hardin Kapp reveals how the women of the Natchez Garden Club saved their city, created one of the first cultural tourism economies in the United States, changed the Mississippi landscape through historic preservation, and fashioned elements of the Lost Cause into an industry. Beginning with the first Natchez Spring Pilgrimage of Antebellum Homes in 1932, such women as Katherine Grafton Miller, Roane Fleming Byrnes, and Edith Wyatt Moore challenged the notion that smokestack industries were key to Natchez’s prosperity. These women developed a narrative of graceful living and aristocratic gentlepeople centered on grand but decaying mansions. In crafting this pageantry, they created a tourism magnet based on the antebellum architecture of Natchez. Through their determination and political guile, they enlisted New Deal programs, such as the WPA Writers’ Project and the Historic American Buildings Survey, to promote their version of the city. Their work did save numerous historic buildings and employed both white and African American workers during the Depression. Still, the transformation of Natchez into a tourist draw came at a racial cost and further marginalized African American Natchezians. By attending to the history of preservation in Natchez, Kapp draws on a rich archive of images, architectural documents, and popular culture to explore how meaning is assigned to place and how meaning evolves over time. In showing how and why the Natchez buildings of the “Old South” were first preserved, commercialized, and transformed into a brand, this volume makes a much-needed contribution to ongoing debates over the meaning attached to cultural patrimony.

The Texas Model: Prosperity in the Lone Star State and Lessons for America, 2014 Edition, is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The book compares Texas to its large state peers and details why Texas is increasingly the destination for Americans seeking a better life. The Texas Model describes a state with low taxes, modest government, and a lawsuit climate that allows entrepreneurship to flourish while encouraging job creation. The book also introduces and details the "Soft Tyranny Index" for both the federal government and the 50 states, looking at the extent to which government exerts a controlling influence on the lives of Americans in a manner Alexis de Tocqueville presciently warned about in Democracy in America in 1835. The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan research institute based in Austin, Texas with Brooke Rollins as its President and CEO. The Foundation's mission is to promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility and free enterprise in Texas and the nation by educating and affecting policymakers and the Texas public policy debate with academically sound research and outreach. The public is demanding a different direction for their government, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation is providing the ideas that enable policymakers to chart that new course guided by these principles: * Individual Liberty * Personal Responsibility * Free Markets * Private Property Rights * Limited government Chuck DeVore is Vice President of Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. From 2004 to 2010, Chuck represented almost 500,000 people in the California State Assembly in Orange County. He was the Vice Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation and served on the Budget Committee and Joint Legislative Audit Committee. In 2010, Chuck competed for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in California. Chuck worked as an executive in the aerospace industry before starting his service as an elected official. Chuck was a Reagan White House appointee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where he was a Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs. Chuck is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army (retired) Reserve. He graduated with honors from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in Strategic Studies in 1985. Chuck and his wife Diane were married in 1988. They have two daughters and make their home in Dripping Springs, Texas.

This volume of original research contains specific policy reform proposals for promoting prosperity in West Virginia. The authors present the case for why state policy should focus more heavily on promoting long-run economic growth. The authors review the scientific evidence on which policies best promote growth and conclude that a policy climate consistent with capitalism, or 'economic freedom, ' is the best way to accomplish growth and higher living standards. These policies work because they result in increased capital formation, higher labor productivity, and reduced levels of wasteful rent-seeking and lobbying activity. This volume concludes with a set of specific growth-oriented policy reforms that address the broad spectrum from tax policy to legal reform to the security of private property rights. We hope that readers of this volume will come away with a better understanding of capitalism's true potential to generate long-run economic progress.

AN EXAMINATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY USES AND ABUSES OF AN AMERICAN IDEAL DURING A TIME OF PERCEIVED PROSPERITY In The Struggle for America's Promise, Claire Goldstene seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideals in American history, that of economic opportunity. She explores the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals and corporate consolidations of the Gilded Age. Some proponents of equal opportunity seek to promote upward financial mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere thereby rewarding merit over inherited wealth. Others use opportunity as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension, embedded with the idea of equal opportunity itself and continually reaffirmed by immigrant populations, animated social dissent among urban workers while simultaneously serving efforts by business elites to counter such dissent. Goldstene uses a biographical approach to focus on key figures along a spectrum of political belief as they struggled to reconcile the inherent contradictions of equal opportunity. She considers the efforts of Booker T. Washington in a post-Civil War South to ground opportunity in landownership as an attempt to confront the intersection of race and class. She also explores the determination of the Knights of Labor to define opportunity in terms of controlling one's own labor. She looks at the attempts by Samuel Gompers through the American Federation of Labor as well as by business elites through the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation to shift the focus of opportunity to leisure and consumption. The Struggle for America's Promise also includes such radical figures as Edward Bellamy and Emma Goldman, who were more willing to step beyond the boundaries of the discourse about opportunity and question economic competition itself. CLAIRE GOLDSTENE, Davis, California, has taught United States history at the University of Maryland, the University of North Flordia, and American University. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Thought and Action, Journal of Third-World Studies, and Southern Historian, among others.

Some vols. include supplemental journals of "such proceedings of the sessions, as, during the time they were depending, were ordered to be kept secret, and respecting which the injunction of secrecy was afterwards taken off by the order of the House."