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The town I live in has a rich history of logging, mining and fishing. In 1997, the logging was effectively ripped from our heritage, leaving 500 families with out a job. At that time, tourism was quite big in our area, our town serving about a half a million people a year from cruise ships. We had, and still have, ample natural resources for mining, and logging, but due to environmental constraints, those resources can not be economically tapped now. All that we are left with is tourism, as the fishing has been lean this last decade as well.

Tourism is a fickle industry. The dollars that come in tend to be paid to low wage jobs, and the profit is generally sapped up by stores who's owners are from out of state, or out of country. The jobs are seasonal, and cannot generally support a family. The tax revenue is high, but slipping as the tourists become more frugal, and the money tends to be spent on the increased infrastructure needed to support the massive influxes of people to our small island community.

In other words, tourism is not a feasible industry because the jobs are not year round, and the wages are low, so cannot support a person, nor a family. The money that is retained as profit leaves the community and is not invested inside it. This combined with the investments that the city government has to make in infrastructure, such as massive dock facilities for the cruise ships, makes for a near break even proposition.

The true perfect industry is one that takes no resource from the ground, water or forest. Its one that brings money into the community in the form of wages, utilities, and property taxes, but does not take money from the community in the form of sales. It does not have a product to sell, it only has a place to be. The perfect industry is information.

In our community, the perfect industry would be if a large corporation with a large staff of programmers, engineers, or other information jobs that can be done in an office, wanted to let their employees live in places that were more rural, more natural. If those companies bought an office building here, and then their employees lived here, because of our town's quaint feeling, small town values, natural wonders, and away from it all feeling, it would fulfill that ideal business proposition for towns like ours. The employees get wages, buy houses, groceries, gas. The company owns the building, pays property taxes, utilities, etc. The work is done via high capacity fiber optic lines, and sent to head quarters. Every one is happy because the resource that is utilized is one that is out of thin air. There's no army corp. of engineers permits, there is no need for an environmental impact study, there is no oil discharge plan. The money comes from out side and stays inside the community.

This would be the perfect industry.

Learn more about this author, Thomas Howard Elliot.
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