Unfortunately I can't attach the wonderful map so I'll just write all these states: Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky.
So what is the best city/cities in this area based on things like BigTech R&D, FinTech, startups and academia?
First things first, I'm from Eastern Europe so my english can be a little cooked. I'm 21 now and started my political journey at 14. Ages not 100% correct because I don't remember all stuff but it doesn't matter. Let's get start:
14-17 y.o. – communism. Not a very surprising ideology for a post-soviet teenager. At first it was just a soviet nostalgia but later I even read Marx's Kapital. Back then I was absolutely sure that all this capitalist-liberal-democratic stuff is too complicated and if we just take everything and devide it equally we will build a better world (of course after k1lling every bourgeois, oppositioner and in general everyone who we don't like).
17-18 y.o. – finally the understanding that ruthless dictatorship is bad reached my small brain, so I embraced democratic socialism. That year I discovered british "old labour" under sir Attlee and it was exactly what I was searching for: everyone is equal and happy.
18 y.o. – I got to the part of british history where the "old labour" led to big troubles in economy, so I rejected it and was searching for something new. This new was paternalistic conservatism (a.k.a. bismarkism in Germany and one nation toryism in the UK). It was stable and pro-labour like socialism but less dogmatic.
18 y.o. – I continued to move away from socialism, so I moved from one nation tory to high tory (a.k.a. traditionalists). Again, it matched my need for "stability" but also my newly knowledge in economics. It also coincided the moment I was interested in religion.
19 y.o. – I finally gave up on the idea of "iron fist" that was in my brain since the communist phase and moved down to liberal conservatism and people like Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller. I would say, it was the moment when I finally got rid of all my childhood ideas and changed my view on this world.
19 y.o. – I discovered right wing libertarianism and moved even further down. Now my idols were Calvin Coolidge and Bush Sr. I also tried to discover ancap but it was so unlogical that I quickly gave up.
20 y.o. – I started to learn economics and understood problems of the uncontrollable privatization (hello Great depression and 2007 recession). So I stepped back a little bit to what can be called a "soft" or "progressive" libertarianism.
21 y.o. – because of some external events I finally gave up on the idea of hierarchy itself and embraced left wing market anarchism (a.k.a. anarcho-individualism). Well, philosophically. I understand that it won't work in the nearest future but it is my vision of perfect society: no central government, free market and self-governance for state institutions like universities, fire departments and other.
Hope you didn't get bored reading all this mess.
I'm not an economist but from what I get about MMT from other thread here is that it's basically an idea that government can print money to finance the creation of new workplaces and it won't cause inflation because people who get hired using these printed money will create a real value. Sounds like programs that was created after WW1 by Mussolini and then copied by H1tler and FDR. Weren't they doing the same thing: print money to finance infrastructure projects/industrialization/war?