New York Times columnist Paul Krugman dumps on the South in his latest book. Actually, it’s white Southerners he has a problem with for resisting efforts to turn America into a socialist nation:

“White backlash against the civil rights movement is the reason America is the only advanced country where a major political party wants to roll back the welfare state. Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign with a states’ rights speech outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered; Newt Gingrich was able to take over Congress entirely because of the great Southern flip, the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support for Democrats to overwhelming support for Republicans.”

Take Krugman’s views with a heavy dose of sodium, however. Any economist who still believes a command economy is the way to go has serious believability problems.

Coincidentally, on the same day I stumbled on this article about Krugman’s “Southern Man” views, I read a quite different take by Ed Lasky at The American Thinker. The very values that keep creeping socialism at bay in the South are the ones that have fueled the enormous economic growth of the region, says Lasky. Henry W. Grady, a leader of the “New South” movement in the late 19th century, must be smiling from journalism heaven. Says Lasky:

The South has long risen from the ashes of the Civil War, and by many measures it the most admirable region of our nation. It may well be on the verge of becoming America’s dominant region, eclipsing the Eastern Seaboard that has reigned from our nation’s birth, and sprinting past the ambitions of the West Coast challenge, as the reference point for where America is going and as the heart of American culture.

Things are looking up, as long as migrating Yankees don’t mess it up.