HOW YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM? The Ole Perfesser is upset that some alleged New Yorker (not me!) sent him an anti-Southerner email -- upset enough to enlist in support of his native land Michael Silence, who suggests that a lot of New Yorkers move down South to... the Washington, D.C. metro area. Yee-haw!

But seriously, the article Silence links also shows a lot of growth deeper within Confederate territory: "Sixty of the fastest-growing counties were in the South..."

As a casual observer may notice from this more recent U.S. Census press release, though, many of the fastest-growing counties (such as Harris, Maricopa, and Tarrant) contain large cities (Houston, Phoenix, and Fort Worth, in the aforementioned cases), and it is not unfair to deduce -- despite the Perfesser's boundless faith in telecommuting -- that job opportunities contingent upon urban life may have motivated much of the resettlement. It's one thing to light out for the territory and another to follow a job or career path.

That many of these opportunities exist in the Southern states is indeed a remarkable phenomenon. But when people have the money to live where they please, where do they choose to go? The alarming masses of trust-funders currently occupying the choicer parts of my borough suggest that the freedom offered by wealth (according to libertarian philosophy, the highest state of man) leads to Blue State metropolitan areas.

I believe this case was most eloquently made by Paul Henning, who mapped the migratory pattern of rural sharecroppers suddenly blessed with windfall profits: