Since the beginning of our fine state, our geographically based assets have ensured a steady supply of family-wage jobs for our people.
Initially, those jobs were based on natural resources, and so necessarily were very tied to our geographic advantages (growing trees, growing apples and wheat, fishing, proximity to Alaska, for example).
Next, those jobs were factory-based, so once you’d built a bunch of factories for big things and their components (airplanes for example), there was a natural inertia that kept those jobs here, at least for a period of time.
