The last time I wrote a column immediately following our state’s birthday, I kept things relatively light — and why not? The weather was fine. My fianceé and I went for a run in Carson City. My friend and his new wife brought his dog to the Nevada Day parade. Both I and our now-governor pet his dog, albeit not at the same time. Ryan Bundy, running for governor himself, rode by in a homemade armored personnel carrier. 

Things were, in a word, normal. Yes, there was clearly room for what passed for “normal” in Nevada at the time, but there always is, there always was, and there always will be. 

Being a Nevadan has always meant buying into something of a paradox. Culturally, we like to pride ourselves on our independence and self-reliance. In reality, both of our largest metropolitan areas and our state capital are all watered from watersheds that originate from out-of-state; we produce less food than any state that isn’t part of New England; and we produce less manufacturing output than Idaho (not per capita — overall), to say nothing of the rest of our neighbors. 

In many ways, Nevada is arguably the least self-reliant state in the union.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Due to Nevada’s perpetually parched landscape, our state produces more food than it should and would produce less if we were legally allowed to. Manufacturing can get thirsty, too, as recent attempts to secure water for two of our state’s largest industrial parks revealed. Consequently, given our resource constraints, it makes sense that Nevadans would choose to do one thing well — usually something other states are more reluctant to countenance within their borders — over trying to embrace the routine industriousness that propels most other state economies. 

What we’ve lacked in natural resources, we’ve historically tried to make up in shamelessness and single-mindedness.

Unfortunately, as Nevadans have been forced to learn the hard way over and over again throughout our state's 156 years, doing one thing nobody else wants to do, and doing it well, is all fine and good until one of two things happens — either people decide they want what we’ve hyper-specialized upon less than they used to, or, inspired by our example, they decide what we’re offering isn’t so bad for their backyards after all.

The first happened to mining over a century ago. In the 19th century, the Comstock Lode — which maintained heavy and steady production for nearly two decades — set what turned out to be grossly unrealistic expectations for other mining operations throughout Nevada. There was enough ore underground to produce more than a few millionaires and build a town with all of the modern conveniences the time had to offer from scratch. With that sole example in mind, financiers in San Francisco, flush with California gold and Comstock silver, were more than happy to sink capital into town building in exchange for being the first at the next site of the next gold or silver rush.

Too bad there wasn’t one — not at the Comstock’s scale, anyway.

Towns like Tonopah, Goldfield, and Rhyolite proved to be the dot-com busts of the early 20th century. Each of them began with world-beating ambition and built creature comforts accordingly, only to discover they were each sitting on a few years of ore at most. Even Virginia City, which started the city-building trend in the first place, already began its decline. In much the same way ping-pong tables and in-office catering became symbols of Silicon Valley excess in the late ‘90s, brick construction, electricity, opera houses and running water were the creature comforts financiers overinvested in during the early 1900’s. 

By the time the 1906 San Francisco quake struck, which drew capital out of Nevada and towards more reliable investment opportunities presented in the rebuilding of the city, the message was received loud and clear. Nevadans could profitably pull ore out of mountains, but there was no profit in encouraging Nevadans to build anything to last. 

So, outside of a few isolated farming and ranching towns, including the nuclei of what would eventually become Reno, Las Vegas, and Elko, we didn’t. 

Post-1906 mining camps became tent camps, or, if they were especially profitable, collections of wooden shacks. Most of them either burned down, washed away, or were disassembled, shack by shack, and reassembled at the next site. Though this was a considerably more profitable way to extract ore from Nevada’s deserts, it did nothing to build civic engagement or lasting infrastructure in the state. 

The second thing — people deciding our vices make good neighbors after all — started more than four decades ago when New Jersey legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City during the nation’s bicentennial. Owing to New Jersey’s closer proximity to most of the nation’s population centers, a minor real estate developer (and future politician) from New York concluded that Atlantic City had an excellent chance at becoming the next Las Vegas — showgirls, prize fights, and all — and bet accordingly, both with his money and anyone else’s he could get his hands on.

The good news, at least for those of us who don’t have to work in or live near his now-bankrupt casinos, was that he was wrong. Very, very wrong.

The bad news is why he was wrong. Atlantic City demonstrated that there was nothing special about casino gaming — it could be profitable anywhere as long as it’s done cheap. Entertainment, however, is a different story. Atlantic City’s misfortune was that it was competing against New York City, Times Square and Broadway, not Las Vegas. There was and absolutely is a market for casino gambling throughout the country — it just looks more like a hundred smaller locally oriented casinos scattered throughout the country than a Taj Mahal two hours from Madison Square Garden competing for the same acts.

Too bad nobody told the rest of Nevada in advance. 

Las Vegas, and Clark County more broadly, has benefited from both a carefully curated culture of shamelessness (“What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas”) and a consistent history of hosting top-shelf entertainment. The rest of Nevada, however, never had the budget to compete with Las Vegas for talent nor the stomach to become an amusement park for libertines. Unable to provide consistently compelling reasons for tourists to travel instead of gambling closer to home, casinos outside of Clark County started declining in the 1990s, slowly evaporating and consolidating as the old mining camps did nearly a century prior. 

Since then, each area has learned to specialize in something else, to develop a new reason for existence. Absolutely none of them, however, provide Las Vegas a useful example to follow — and that’s a problem because the Comstock Lode of gambling is played out. Sheldon Adelson can feel it. So can MGM Resorts. Yes, COVID-19 might be the catalyst that sparked this decline, just as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the catalyst that pushed Nevada’s mines over the edge, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now. Visitor counts have been declining since 2016, airport traffic only finally exceeded 2007 traffic in 2017, and inflation has been growing faster than gaming revenue for more than a decade.

Las Vegas, in other words, was in trouble long before COVID-19 came along. The virus just revealed where the problems were.

So what is Clark County’s path forward?

Even if you don’t live in Clark County (which I don’t and never have), it’s impossible to ignore the 75 percent of Nevadans who do live there and the gaping hole in the state government’s budget caused by the collapse of Nevada’s largest industry. The rest of Nevada simply doesn’t have the numbers — neither demographically nor economically — to meaningfully support Southern Nevada while it persistently struggles with higher-than-average unemployment.

Unfortunately, the rest of the state also doesn’t offer many compelling paths for Clark County to follow, either. 

Las Vegas, for example, will never be Lake Tahoe. There’s not nearly enough water in Lake Mead, for starters, nor is the scenery anywhere near that picturesque (though I’ll freely concede that Red Rock and Mount Charleston are pretty in their own way). Similarly, unless Clark County is willing to reduce its population to a hundredth of its current population and start strip mining every nearby mountain range, Elko probably won’t provide many useful examples, either. 

This leaves Reno and Sparks, which seem like more pertinent examples. The half a million residents in Washoe County is closer in scale to the two million and change in Clark County. Both are near large California metropolitan areas. Washoe County was even Nevada’s original gaming and tourism mecca. If Reno and Sparks can diversify and manufacture their way out of the decline of their tourist economies, why can’t Las Vegas?

There are, I suspect, at least two reasons.

First, Clark County’s population is significantly larger and has always been considerably more dependent upon gaming employment than Washoe County’s. It’s easier to retrain and re-employ tens of thousands of workers than it is to retrain and re-employ hundreds of thousands of workers. 

Second, Reno and Sparks are close to a metropolitan area that almost completely deindustrialized decades ago, choosing instead to specialize in technology and coding. Los Angeles, on the other hand, isn’t San Francisco — instead, it’s the largest manufacturing center in the nation and it’s connected to the nation’s largest and second-largest container ports (the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach). 

In order for Reno, Sparks, and nearby communities to effectively compete against the Bay Area for manufacturing jobs, they don’t just rely upon lower taxes. Sales and property taxes, for example, are considerably lower in Hawthorne than most of Nevada, yet you don’t see businesses eager to relocate there. Network effects — potential employees familiar with manufacturing work, nearby suppliers, and so on —- also matter, as well as competition for labor. Since the Bay Area stopped meaningfully manufacturing much of anything decades ago, choosing to focus on finance and technology instead, Northern Nevada isn’t competing against pre-existing networks of manufacturers in the Bay Area with the experience and ability to meet existing regional needs.

In the case of Las Vegas, however, all of the network effects in manufacturing point in the wrong direction. Los Angeles has been an industrial powerhouse for generations and has the transportation infrastructure to support even more industrial output than it already generates. Unlike Reno and Sparks, which can compete on proximity for Bay Area companies looking to explore opportunities in light manufacturing, Las Vegas has to compete against being both farther away from established manufacturers in Los Angeles and having fewer workers skilled in the work Los Angeles is already doing. 

This, incidentally, is also why Las Vegas hasn’t turned into another Silicon Valley, despite periodic attempts to nurture one there. Clark County never had a large native population of programming talent, nor does UNLV produce enough programmers to support one. Los Angeles, on the other hand, already had plenty of programmers (originally nurtured by defense contractors, among others) and a well-developed post-secondary education system that produces them — which is why Los Angeles now has Silicon Beach while Las Vegas sells shoes online. 

I bring this up not to rain on Clark County’s parade — though, as dry as it’s been, you might appreciate it down there if I did. Diversifying Clark County’s economy is absolutely vital if it doesn’t want to become Detroit in the desert and manufacturing will undoubtedly play a part in it. However, just as Virginia City has never been the same since the Comstock Lode exhausted itself, it’s possible Las Vegas will never be what it once was, either. If so, we better learn how to get comfortable with that.

Happy Nevada Day, everyone. Enjoy it while it lasts. 

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].