They wrote Mississippi off. Today we're thriving.

10 minutes ago
3 min read

By Douglas Carswell, President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy

$79 billion invested since 2020. xAI, Amazon and Aluminum Dynamics chose Mississippi over anywhere on earth. What changed was never the soil — it was the rules we chose to live by.

The longer I live in Mississippi, the more I love it here.

For decades, elite coastal opinion thought little of this state – if at all. The Magnolia State, in their movies and in their mindset, was a place to be pitied and patronized — to be talked about but never to. They were quite sure they knew what this state was, and what it would always be.

They were wrong. Mississippi is part of the Boom Belt — and some of those coastal elites would do well to sit up and pay attention to the great things happening here.

Stop and ask why

Since 2020, some $79 billion has been invested in this state. This year — 2026 — is already the biggest on record, and it isn't close. And the names now choosing to build here are names that could build anywhere on earth: Elon Musk's xAI, Amazon, Aluminum Dynamics. They looked at the entire planet, and they chose Mississippi.

Stop and ask why. The laws of physics are no different here than in California; nor is the air, or the water. What changed was not the ground beneath our feet. It was the rules we chose to live by.

Look, too, at the company we now keep. We build more cars per person than Germany. Our children read better than the children of California. On GDP per person, we have overtaken Britain — my native country, which is no small thing for me to sit and write. The state they wrote off is now out-performing some of the richest places on earth.

And the momentum is ours. Inward investment is growing three times faster than New York's. Our unemployment is lower than Florida's. We are growing faster than Tennessee. This is not a state struggling to catch up. It is a state pulling away.

None of this happened by magic

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened by magic. Mississippi did the hard things. We cut taxes, and set the state on the road to abolishing the income tax altogether. We gave parents a real say in their children's education. We cleared away the rules that once told people they couldn't work, couldn't build, couldn't try.

That is the whole argument, gathered in one place. Get government out of the way; trust free people; and watch what they do. It is the oldest idea in the American story — that prosperity is simply what happens when ordinary men and women are left free to build it — and Mississippi has just proved it true all over again.

You only have to ask why xAI is rising here, and not in the state Elon left, to see it. The genius was never in the soil. It was in the decision to let people keep more of what they earn, and to stop standing in their way.

I've put the whole story — the numbers, and an interactive map of every major project — at mississippiwins.com. Take a look. Then send it to someone who still believes they know what Mississippi is.

My own regret? Only that I made my way to Mississippi five years ago, and so missed so much of the story that came before.