Texas is a fantastic place to do business: Taxes are low, the trial lawyers are on a short leash, regulation is light, and the state government is an energetic advocate of business growth.
Also: Texas is an insanely terrible place to do business: It has corrupt public officials — law-enforcement officers on the cartel dime, judges selling verdicts, members of a drug task force shepherding contraband from Mexico, school-board races in which cash and cocaine are traded for votes — along with a corrupt university system flouting its admissions rules for the family and friends of state legislators, a generous statewide economic-development program that swaps grants for job creation but fails to adequately keep track of either, an out-of-control prosecutor in charge of a state ethics office who, when she is not berating and threatening the police officers who have hauled her in on drunk-driving charges, uses her office as a political weapon — just as her predecessor in the office did — while the state’s Medicaid program alone is a cavalcade of hilariously unethical shenanigans: Texas’s Medicaid-fraud police are so bad at their job and spend so much money that a state audit suggested that taxpayers would be better off if the office did not exist; a former state actuary working on Medicaid fraud is being investigated for fraud; a purveyor of Medicaid-fraud-detection software won a state contract under questionable circumstances that led to the resignation of the top lawyer at the Health and Human Services Commission . . .
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