1) The South Rises Again!

Our chart of the day is from the real estate site Redfin, and it shows that eight of the 10 housing markets rising the most in home values are in (where else?) the South.

And with no disrespect to our loyal readers in Ohio, don't ask us how Toledo got on this list of hot spots.

2) And the Real Winner of the New York Mayor Election? Dallas

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson is salivating over NYC's embrace of Zohran Mamdani's collectivism.

Big D has already added 100,000 finance jobs in the last 10 years. The New York Stock Exchange recently launched NYSE Texas, Nasdaq recently announced plans for Nasdaq Texas, and Goldman Sachs and Scotiabank have made big investments.

"What was already a trickle is going to turn into a flood of individuals and companies who have called New York home for a long time, moving to Dallas," he told the New York Post. "They’re talking about trying to find new ways to tax people, compared to one where we're trying to push down the one tax we've got, and we don't have an income tax."

He calls his city the nation's premier "sanctuary city from socialism."

He told us at the HOTLINE he can envision a day when people will say:

"Do you remember back when New York was the financial capital of the United States? Isn't that weird?"

3) Milton Friedman Agrees With Us

We took some flak from HOTLINE readers yesterday when we suggested that Venezuela should privatize the oil industry and give every citizen a share of the profits.  

It turns out this is exactly what Milton Friedman recommended in 2004 regarding Iraq's oil resources, after the fall of Saddam.

Here's the exchange Friedman had with our friend David Asman:

DA: Now one of the first things that we did with Iraqi oil is to announce that we'd set up a national oil company in Iraq.

MF: A terrible mistake...  We should have privatized the oil industry...  We should have established an oil company and sold all of the oil resources, take the capital and put it in a fund for the people of Iraq. Very much like we did with the oil fund that they have in Alaska.

DA: So that every single law-abiding Iraqi would have a share of Iraqi oil.

MF: That's right. And the government would not control it. The only thing that the government would do is to get the income from it to distribute to the Iraqi people.

DA: So that the Iraqi people would have a direct stake in peace and prosperity in their own country.

MF: That's right. Now, we ought not to be solving Iraq's problems for it. Iraq ought to be solving its own problems. And the sooner we can transfer effective control to the Iraqis the better.

4) The Next Oil Boom Might Be in Argentina

Our friend Harold Hamm, one of the godfathers of the shale/fracking revolution is betting big on the shale formations of Argentina and the political and economic stability ushered in by Javier Milei.

On Monday, Hamm, the highly successful founder of Continental Resources, one of America's largest independent oil companies, announced that the company is going to be investing up to $200 million per year in Argentina.

"There's a lot that we like about this new administration. President Milei could be on his way to a real economic turnaround... we think it could be a great deal for the coun­try and for our com­pany as well."

Investment by companies like Continental Resources is precisely what developing economies need in order to create jobs and boost their economic growth rate. And such investment also creates jobs back home in the U.S.

It’s another example of how freedom and free enterprise create prosperity.

5) Missouri: Show Me a Tax Cut

This past summer, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a law to kill the state's capital gains tax. He was just getting started. Now, Kehoe and Republican lawmakers have their sights on doing away with the entire state income tax.  

Great idea. Nine states - including three others from the Southeastern Conference (Florida, Tennessee, and Texas) - have no income tax. The map below shows where the nine no-income-tax states are. They are almost all highly prosperous.

The question is how would Missouri pay its bills without an income tax?

One plan would phase out the income tax of 4.7% over three to six years and cap state spending. That has been tried in other states, but so far no state has made it to zero this way.

We prefer the Laffer cold turkey solution: immediately eliminate the Missouri income tax (why wait?) and pay for this by broadening the sales tax base to include all of the more than 200 products and services that have been unwisely exempted from tax.  

This approach makes everyone pay their fair share and supercharges the economy.

6) You Say Mamdani, We Say Maduro

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