A recent article published by Representative Llew Jones argues that Montana’s economy has “shifted” from natural resource industries to tourism, service work, and high-end real estate — and that our tax system and future economic vision should shift along with it. In other words, we should accept this new direction and reshape our economic policies and tax structure to serve wealthy newcomers rather than the working industries that built Montana.
I couldn’t disagree more.
Montana earned the name “The Treasure State” long before luxury homes and tourism brochures became our calling card. Our prosperity was built on copper, coal, timber, oil, gas, agriculture, and the hard work of the men and women who turned raw resources into real opportunity.
Yet today, some in Helena argue that Montana should lean even further into tourism, seasonal service-sector jobs, and tourists’ spending habits. That approach isn’t just misguided — it’s risky. It ignores how we ended up here in the first place.
Montana didn’t outgrow its industry — we regulated it to death. Federal agencies, activist groups, and layers of red tape choked off the very jobs that built this state. It became easier to construct multimillion-dollar vacation homes than to build sawmills. Our younger workers were left chasing short-term service jobs while the industries that once gave them real futures disappeared.
Our economy didn’t change because Montanans wanted it to. It changed because we allowed it to. It changed because we stopped fighting for our right to work in our own state.
Tourism is a fine supplement, but it is not a foundation. When the economy dips, tourism is among the first industries to suffer. We saw it during the 2008 real estate crash and again during COVID — travel stopped, paychecks vanished, and entire communities suffered. And today, a large share of those tourist dollars doesn’t even remain in our state; they flow to corporate owners with mailing addresses far from Montana.
But the bigger issue is this: a tourism-based economy cannot sustain Montana’s families, schools, or infrastructure in the long term. A resource-based economy can.
This is where Llew Jones’ argument truly fails. Building Montana’s future around ever-higher taxes on wealthy newcomers isn’t a strategy; it’s a gamble. Wealth tied to tourism, second homes, and luxury properties isn’t an industry — it’s a preference — preferences change, and markets shift. Those people can sell tomorrow, and many do whenever a state’s tax climate changes or another destination becomes more appealing.
When a state pins its tax base to one narrow, affluent class of property owners, it’s not “modernizing the economy” — it’s putting all of Montana’s eggs in one very fragile basket. That isn’t stability. That’s volatility.
A strong, diverse economy can include tourism. Still, its foundation is built on tangible production — industries that cannot be outsourced, relocated, or shut down based on a trend. Mining. Drilling. Timber. Ranching. Farming. Manufacturing. These sectors anchor families, support schools, stabilize communities, and generate year-round revenue because they are rooted in the land itself.
Montana’s natural resources are blessings, not burdens. God placed abundant mineral, timber, grazing, and energy resources beneath and around us. But instead of stewarding them responsibly and using them to provide prosperity for our people, we’ve locked them away behind red tape, activist lawsuits, and federal micromanagement.
And when we stop utilizing our resources, we don’t “protect” Montana — we weaken it. We turn Montana into a playground for visitors and a vacation haven for the elite, rather than a place where our children and grandchildren can build real lives and futures.
Montana doesn’t need to surrender to the “minerals to mansions” narrative. We don’t need to accept an economy built on postcards and property speculation. We need to reclaim the industries we allowed to be regulated out of existence and restore a Montana where hardworking families can build real lives rooted in real production.
Tourism may bring cash, but industry brings stability. Industry brings families and builds communities that last.
Montana’s future won’t be saved by catering to elites — it will be saved when Montanans get back to work. And that starts with real permitting reform.
We need a system that allows responsible mining, drilling, and timber projects to move forward without years of bureaucratic delay and red tape. Common-sense permitting reform doesn’t mean cutting corners — it means cutting waste. It means trusting Montanans to do the work safely, efficiently, and sustainably, instead of letting distant agencies hold our economy hostage.
If we want to rebuild Montana’s industrial backbone, we must make it possible to actually build again.
Comments
2 responses to “Montana’s Prosperity Depends on Industry, Not Vacation Homes”
I couldn’t agree more. Unless we wish Montana to continue devolving into being little more than a boutique locale attractive to the well-heeled tourist or 2nd home owner serviced by low-paid service locals, we need to broaden our economic horizons.
The Montana of my grandparents era had a robust middle class supported by the wealth generated by the timber, mining and rail industries and those exports to the outside world brought vast wealth into the community. It was possible for most people to live a better-than-nominal middle class existence here. But by the ‘70s, lumber and mining were shadows of their former existence. This made environmentalists very happy, but this left the university, health care and tourism as the primary employers. These industries do not bring in anything comparable to the wealth that exporting lumber and minerals did, and most of the jobs in their wake are of the low-paying service variety. Tourism and the kind of jobs it creates will never be able to compare with the jobs and wealth created by the extraction economy of over 50 years ago.
The Montana that people now seem to pine for, a sleepy bedroom community lacking a nearby urban center where wealth is created, was never really viable. Montana was largely living off the glory and leftovers of the extraction economy past. Meanwhile people today still want to have the comfortable existence that the middle class enjoys elsewhere, but that’s not possible if the community has little to export in trade for the manufactured consumer comforts that are now taken for granted. (Take a 360-degree look around you right now and ask yourself how many items you see that came from somewhere other than Montana) In the decades since the decline of the extraction economy, Montana has largely resisted most industrial activity that would have replaced some of that wealth in the name of environmental quality. As laudable as that may seem, unfortunately there has been a price to be paid for that.
This all didn’t matter so much as Montana remained an economic backwater when compared to the economy of the more industrious states. Due to Montana’s relative geographic and economic isolation from the rest of the country, population grew slowly and the cost of living remained largely static, much slower than the rest of the country.
But starting about 20 years ago, technology and monetary policy started to change everything.
Historically low interest rates combined with easy, streamlined lending made money cheap. Cheap money allowed people who easily qualified the ability to bid up the price of housing in tight markets. In the meantime work-from-home became a thing.
And exclusively targeting the wealth of outsiders is not the answer either. People with high wealth also have options and high mobility, and they will start to leave, just as they left other places to be here. The unfortunate reality is that Montana has now become economically dependent upon the money that these outsiders make else where and bring into the state. If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make those people disappear, yes, real estate would get cheaper again. But the state would also immediately go bankrupt. Because we have nothing else to sell to make up the difference.
We need to think seriously about the points Mr. Walter raises. Missoula’s “Regressive-not Progressive” County Commissioners have raised insurmountable barriers to Bitcoin mining in their zoning codes. This month they put a permit request for a gravel pit on part of a 64-acre site 3 miles from Bonner “on hold” due to public outcry about the Blackfoot River. A rare earth mining proposal in the Darby area in Ravalli County is also meeting resistance in spite of related national security vulnerabilities that have been widely reported. China has stockpiled and appears to be hoarding rare earth elements as part of its geopolitical strategy to dominate the US.
Maybe we Montanans need to take a deep breath and get better informed about what’s going on outside our borders — in the international economy and in the geopolitical competition that will shape the lives of future generations. Then we can evaluate the trade-offs that come from natural resource usage and avoid the future of dependency on government handouts we’re already seeing take shape in Montana.