Rebuilding Mississippi Beyond Petroleum Marketing

Many of His friends are still stressed out from all of the changes that are going on around them, as they slowly rebuild their lives after Katrina. Reading a book that tells of displacement and recovery can really inspire your future approach to rebuilding.

Hank strongly encourages reading “God Wants You To Be Rich” by Paul Zane Pilzer is all about changes and how capitalism will take care of itself, as creative entrepreneurs reinvent their approach to recovery from displacement. In our quest for economic alchemy, the best of us comes through in a capitalist country.

While Hank found the book very easy to read and inspirational, he was also inspired by his explanation of the predictions of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s work, “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942” whereby he explained that when people feel economically displaced, they look to their government and vote in socialistic leadership. After a generation or two of dismal failures, the children and grandchildren turn back to limited government as vehement capitalists protesting the idealistic controls set by big government, and thereby pure capitalism is reborn stronger than ever.

Throughout the 1970s the entire tourism industry had felt displaced but had no idea who was to blame, so politicians voted in a 3% tourism penalty tax and spend program (Harrison County Tourism Commission) to help stimulate the economy beginning in 1979. As a result, profits increased for national chains hotels and only the national chain hotels. Throughout the 1980s, Mississippi investors could not give away a condo, while they sold like hot cakes in Florida and Alabama. As family tourism continued to be more displaced, locals finally voted in casinos as their solution twelve desperate years later.

The cause of all the family tourism displacement had everything to do with the leading national chain hotel owners’ desire to get the tourist to drive more on vacation and consider another destination where they had significant land and tourism holdings. No matter how much effort locals made to draw tourism to the area, most national chain accommodations in Mississippi Gulf Coast were marketing tourism to Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.

Until Hank traced so many property deeds of nation chain accommodations to domestic and foreign oil companies and other real estate investment companies, he couldn’t understand why our hotels were so willing to commit suicide to their own industry, year after year. While small businesses were blaming casinos in 1993, Hank discovered that over 90% of family tourism brochures in local hotels redirected tourists to attractions and shops in other states, rather that the local downtown. As a traveler, he knows this to be a national economic concern.

Americans burn exponentially more gasoline on vacation than we did before the energy efficient interstate system was built and have seen little results from CAFÉ legislation because oil companies own so much vertical integration in the tourism industry and are so involved in socialistically lead marketing campaigns that keep the locals displaced and the tourist constantly on the move. It’s time to take apart this marketing strategy by big oil companies, big government, a local advertising agency and other real estate developers as we refocus on our core capitalistic principals.


The Political Solutions of Hank the Tourism Alchemist

1. The federal government should outlaw the ownership or the financial backing of foreigner owned accommodations from any business in the sale or distribution of fuel or transportation companies.

2. The state government should seize all tourism penalty tax dollars and dissolve all government leadership programs of tourism and economics, and watch to locals come together around their Chamber and merchant associations to provide their own leadership campaigns.

3. Call Hank for an analysis of the best and least expensive approach to recovery.