The Country of Texas

November 28, 2025

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
–Charles Kingsley

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

How AI will dominate America’s youth
It’s already happening.

It is not racist to notice Somali fraud
They stole your tax dollars.

The greatest sentence ever written
And the values behind it.

A LITTLE MINDCATION

Making beer brats
Quick and delish!

THINKING OUT LOUD

The Country of Texas
Adversity created its character

Only a few states—Texas, Vermont, Hawaii, and California for a few days—were sovereign before joining the United States. But Texas dominates that narrative. Maybe it’s because no other state in the country went to war with a foreign nation to seek its independence. And certainly no other state in the country considers a massacre, the Alamo, the foundation of its existence and values.

In the summer, Texas is an inhospitable place. There is no escape from the heat, even though the distance from its southern to northern tip is over 800 miles. Temperatures hover in the mid 90s or higher from June through at least September. Drought is a regular feature of Texas, particularly in Central Texas, which is often followed by massive rain storms and floods. Each year, the Gulf Coast of Texas is threatened by hurricanes, some which have been enormously destructive. And Texas is the state with the highest frequency of tornadoes.

A large amount of the Texas landscape is covered in thorny plant life. Poisonous snakes slither across the entire state. You can’t grow much in the limestone escarpment of Central Texas, nor in the large arid region of West Texas.

In its early days, free land enticed settlers who came unaware of the native Indians, the Comanche in particular, who fought savagely to end the white man’s advance West. Empire of the Southern Moon recounts the 40-year struggle against the Comanches for Americans to gain access to the land it acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. In some Central Texas cemeteries, you can find gravestones that read “Killed by Indians.”

There were and are many reasons not to come to Texas. Yet people came and are still coming. Why?

To understand Texas is to understand the American frontier. The sheer size of Texas and its isolation from the then settled world demanded resilience and rewarded independence. There was no “safe place” to retreat to, no civilized place to withdraw from the region’s many challenges. People just had to survive, or not.

Settlers who came to Texas did not seek ease. They sought opportunity. They carved ranches out of open prairie; built farms along winding, flood-prone rivers; persevered in conflicts with hostile natives; founded towns where only dust and mesquite stood; and survived its brutal summers, long before air conditioning was invented.

The early Texans—whether immigrant farmers from the American South, Central European immigrants brought in to push out the natives, or Tejano families whose roots stretched back to Spanish settlements—shared a common spirit: the conviction that their lives should be theirs to lead, not dictated by distant authorities. There was effectively no government to support these early Texans, which instilled a deep sense of personal responsibility and individual sovereignty that imbues the Texas government and people to this day.

The early settlers’ drive for self-determination defined the Texas Revolution. While the stories of Goliad, the Alamo, and San Jacinto have been mythologized, as they should be, their essence remains true: a small group of people insisting on the right to govern themselves. Those Texans were willing to sacrifice their lives to gain freedom for their fellow citizens. They fought not for riches, empire, or glory but for the profound idea that liberty is an inalienable right to all human beings. The Republic of Texas stood as a testament to that ideal. That ideal still exists today in every true Texan.

When Texas joined the United States, it did so not as a conquered territory but as a consenting republic. The common ground between both parties was a belief in liberty and freedom. The Texas revolutionary experience mirrored the American revolutionary experience.

Texans are patriotic Americans because the state’s history aligns with the American ethos of individual liberty, enterprise, and the belief that the future rewards the courageous. Maybe more than any other state, Texas is a microcosm of the United States.

Economically, Texas has also behaved like its own nation. From subsistence survival on parched land and swamp land to the cattle boom to the oil booms and now to technological expansion and global trade, the state has thrived by seizing opportunity and adapting to change. Over the years, prosperity has been handed down, yet for some reason this has not numbed the state’s pioneering spirit. Prosperity has only fueled the drive to achieve all the more. This spirit continues to attract people from around the world, particularly those where achievement is frustrated rather than encouraged.

In the end, calling Texas a “country” is less about political distinction than cultural essence. Texas stands unique—distinct yet deeply American, vast yet united by shared ideals. It is a place where liberty is foundational, where sacrifice, effort, and persistence are honored, and where the horizon remains wide open as a kind of siren song to those with vision and a hunger to build.

Texans don’t care where you come from. We just care that you come with an aspiration to create something, anything. Just do. This ethos stretches back all the way to the battle of the Alamo, where every last patriot involved gave his life for the future of those he left behind.

Come to Texas. Just do.

THE RANDOMS

I have yet to understand how the term “Black Friday” became synonymous with shopping, but maybe this year we’ll learn why.

DOGE has been disbanded. Has the deep state won? Oh, wait. Was that just more fake news?

Berkshire Hathaway has invested in Google parent, Alphabet, while Nvidia and Microsoft go long OpenAI. Care to guess which AI platform may be the ultimate winner?

The larger and more complex any system gets, the more systemic risk builds. Whatcha think? Is our world getting more complicated or simpler?

There’s little truth to trust in any given moment. Humanity has experienced many periods of mass psychosis. Today’s TMI world may have put us in several mass psychoses at once.

Has AI become a mass psychosis for governments, companies, and investors?

A repeat from last week: If economic and social cycles run their course over a century or more, rather than a generation or less, would this mean every perspective we have today is based more upon fad than wisdom?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

The beef market is broken for everyone
Unpaid electric bills pile up
Is it OK that the middle class is shrinking?
Causes of the Great Depression
Ford CEO learns from Tesla

Labor

Luddite theory is hitting home
25% of the unemployed have college degrees
McKinsey analyzes the best CEOs

The Lone Star

Houston is a hot manufacturing center
Austin has a new health-tech unicorn
Austin robotics company hits $5B valuation
Hyperscale data center coming to South Texas

BUSINESS

Finance

Gambling, investing, what’s the difference?
Are we close to a big fall?
BlackRock has a 100% loss on a deal
10 things Warren Buffett does differently

Real Estate

Home delistings are surging
Refis making new mortgages more expensive
Is a global housing bubble about to pop?