Ron DeSantis is the Smart Choice for America’s Resurgence

Listening to Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, it was hard not to lose hope for the future of the country and the American experiment.

It was uttered in grandiose raving by a stuttering, dim-witted eighty-year-old man. When he wasn’t tripping over words or making things up (like he’s taming inflation, like the president is controlling interest rates), Joe Biden was an irritable scold, sounding like he was really pissed that someone had lost his teeth. prostheses.

He wants to raise taxes, expand the welfare state, all because he thinks he knows what’s best, even though he hardly knows what day it is. Is this our future? May be.

Biden, for all his ineptitude, is likely to beat a likely GOP rival if it’s former President Donald Trump, another old dude who offers his own set of personal luggage so big we don’t have room in this column to describe. his.

And yet there is a ray of hope—sunshine, to be exact—shining in southern Florida. If you want to see the American experiment flourish, spend a few days there, especially in the melting pot known as Miami, as I recently did.

And talk to some of the locals—immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, even Naples, Italy, and first and second generation Cuban Americans—and you can see where the future of this country could be heading: a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. it really works.

This is not a campaign ad for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is targeting the White House, or even local politicians like Francis Suarez, a very capable mayor of Miami. But both set the tone with a business-friendly tax code and welfare state restrictions, while promoting diverse economic development.

The life force of the Sunshine State

Florida today is more than just Disney World and orange groves. Big tech, Wall Street, cryptocurrencies, hospitality, and amazing restaurants are the blood of the state and the city.

As well as the people who are coming, many of them are immigrants, many of them are settlers from the north, all looking for opportunities that statists like Joe Biden have frowned upon for decades.

Again, spend some time talking to these aspirants like me. They are grinders. Not just brokers and bankers, but people who work in restaurants during the day and ride Uber at night.

At the hotel where I was staying in Miami Beach, the doorman from Haiti explained to me that he thought he had what it takes to one day appear on Fox News, where I work (yes, he is a proud viewer). He was more collected and eloquent. than most college kids I know with the same ambition. So who am I to doubt him?

My taxi driver told me he was a first generation Cuban American. His family came to Miami in the 1970s. The now glitzy South Beach neighborhood was pretty much a “junkyard,” as he put it. Not anymore, he proudly explained as we drove past busy restaurants and high-end fashion stores that hire locals and give them a chance at a better life.

At the restaurant I was served by an Italian waiter who had escaped the suffocating economy of the southern region known as the Mezzogiorno. He left a few years ago and, apparently, will never return, because he can earn a decent living here without paying the local mafia boss.

I have traveled to and around Miami since the mid-1990s, when I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and was assigned to cover the city’s municipal bond corruption.

I met a friend of mine, a local, born in Cuba, who came here and became a pretty big bond seller. Before talking about business, he gave me a tour of Little Havana. We had an arroz con pollo lunch at the amazing Versailles restaurant followed by a cafecito at the famous Maximo Gomez Park, the epicenter of Miami’s Cuban-American community.

Miami has always been a place of change, and in the 1990s, Little Havana, as my friend remarked, was increasingly becoming Little El Salvador and Little Nicaragua. Fast forward to my trip last week and it’s clear that Miami is still changing – and improving through creative capitalist destruction that keeps some of the old and promotes the new.

Yes, the food in Versailles is still great, the characters playing dominoes in the park are still doing their thing. You still see Cuban flags mixed with those of El Salvador and other Latin American countries along Calle Ocho.

Noisy city center

But the downtown business district, which back in the 1990s looked like a ghost town in the middle of the day, is swarming with financiers. New construction of luxury tower blocks and office buildings seems to be happening everywhere.

Meanwhile, Little Havana is undergoing an amazing urban renaissance, with shops and restaurants offering the best of Miami’s cultural melting pot. Tourists who were once afraid to embrace the grittier side of urban Miami are spending money much like they did in South Beach.

Of course, Miami and Florida are not a utopia; drugs, gangs, fentanyl, illegal immigration, homelessness, they’re all here. Like the man from Florida. But people do not come here for utopia. They come for a chance that Sleepy Joe won’t give them.