Listening to Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, it was hard to not lose hope in the long run of the country and the American experiment.
It was delivered with grandiose delusion by a stammering, brain-addled octogenarian. When he wasn’t tripping over words or making stuff up (how he’s taming inflation, as if the president controls rates of interest), Joe Biden was being a petulant scold, sounding as if he was really offended that somebody misplaced his dentures.
He wants to lift taxes, expand the welfare state, all because he thinks he knows what’s best regardless that he barely knows what day it’s. Is that this our future? Possibly.
Biden, for all his incapacity, will probably defeat the likely GOP challenger if it’s former President Donald Trump, one other old dude who offers up his own set of non-public baggage so large, we don’t have room on this column to explain it.
And yet there may be a ray of hope — sunshine, to be precise — beaming down south in Florida. If you would like to see the American experiment flourish, spend just a few days down there, particularly within the melting pot often known as Miami, as I recently did.
Joe Biden will likely defeat Trump if the ex-president is the 2024 Republican nominee. Sipa USA
And refer to a number of the locals — immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, even Naples, Italy, and the first- and second-generation Cuban Americans — and also you see where the long run of this country may very well be heading: A vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem that truly works.
This just isn’t a campaign business for the governor, Ron DeSantis, who has his sights set on the White House, and even the local pols like Francis Suarez, the very able mayor of Miami. But each have set the tone through a business-friendly tax code and limits on the welfare state while promoting diverse economic development.
Sunshine State lifeblood
Florida is greater than just Disney World and orange groves today. Big tech, Wall Street, crypto, hospitality and amazing restaurants are the state’s — and city’s — lifeblood.
So are the people who find themselves arriving, lots of them immigrants, a variety of them transplanted northerners, all of them searching for opportunity that statists like Joe Biden have been discouraging for many years.
Again, spend a while talking to those strivers as I did. They’re grinders. Not only the brokers and bankers, however the individuals who work throughout the day in restaurants, then drive an Uber at night.
On the hotel where I used to be staying in Miami Beach, the Haitian doorman explained to me how he thought he had what it takes to some day be on Fox News where I work (Yes. he’s a proud viewer.) He was more composed and articulate than most youngsters out of school I do know with similar ambitions. So who am I to doubt him?
Ron DeSantis took back control of Disney’s special tax district. Getty Images
My cabdriver told me how he’s a first-generation Cuban American. His family got here to Miami within the Nineteen Seventies. The now-glitzy South Beach area was largely a “dump,” as he put it. Not, he proudly explained as we passed a booming stretch of restaurants and high-end fashion shops that employ the locals and provides them a likelihood at a greater life.
At a restaurant, I used to be served by a waiter from Italy, who escaped the stifling economy of the southern region often known as the “Mezzogiorno.” He left some years ago and by the sound of it, he’s never going back because he can actually make an honest living here without paying off the local Mafia boss.
I’ve been going to Miami and parts of its urban sprawl for the reason that mid-Nineteen Nineties after I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and my project was to cover city corruption that involved the sale of municipal bonds.
I touched base with a friend of mine, an area born in Cuba who got here here and made it pretty big as a bond salesman. Before talking business, he gave me a tour of Little Havana. We had lunch of arroz con pollo on the amazing Versailles Restaurant, followed by some cafecito on the famous Máximo Gómez park, the epicenter of Miami’s Cuban American community.
Miami was at all times a spot of change, and within the Nineteen Nineties Little Havana, as my friend identified, was increasingly becoming Little El Salvador and Little Nicaragua as well. Fast forward to my trip last week and it’s obvious Miami continues to be changing — and improving with creative capitalist destruction that preserves a number of the old and advances the brand new.
Yes, the food continues to be great at Versailles, the characters playing dominoes on the park are still doing their thing. You continue to see Cuban flags mixed with those from El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America along Calle Ocho.
Miami is a various city with a mix of various Hispanic cultures. AFP via Getty Images
Downtown bustling
However the downtown business district, which back within the Nineteen Nineties looked like a ghost town in the course of the day, is bustling with financiers. Recent construction of luxury high-rises and office buildings is seemingly all over the place.
Little Havana, meanwhile, is seeing an incredible urban revival with shops and restaurants offering the most effective of Miami’s cultural medley. Tourists who were once afraid to embrace urban Miami’s grittier side are spending like they do in South Beach.
After all, Miami and Florida aren’t utopia; drugs, gangs, fentanyl, illegal immigration, homelessness, they’re all here. So is Florida Man. But people don’t come here for utopia. They arrive for the possibility that Sleepy Joe won’t give them.