On Fox Business, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary touted North Dakota’s remarkable pro-growth environment with the Nation’s fastest growing GDP per capita. While O’Leary praised North Dakota for its pro-business policies and oil and energy production, he also praised the State for its sovereign public bank, which may seem antithetical for a Reaganite Conservative. Kevin O’Leary deserves scrutiny for being a paid spokesman for FTX, after previously calling crypto garbage, but it is nice to hear a pro-business conservative make a free market case for public banking. O’Leary, who opposed the bank bailouts, considers public banking, a more fiscally responsible alternative to putting the tax payers on the line for reckless banking decisions and moral hazard. There is also much less risk of bank runs, than with fractional reserve banking, where banks are only required to hold a fraction of deposits.

There is irony in how some of the strongest populist policies are in conservative Red States like North Dakota, which also has restrictions on mega corporations owning agriculture, much like Alaska’s citizen dividend from oil extraction. On the other hand, the leftwing Jacobin, had an op-ed in support for public banking, granting credit to founding North Dakota’s Public Bank, in 1919, to a leftwing farmers movement. This movement was in response to wheat farmers being preyed upon by private bankers, with the objective of creating a bottom up economy, where the common man could have access to credit, and not be reliant upon Wall Street. Though this left-populist, localist, agrarian, movement, including the Non-Partisan League, were very different from what is considered leftwing today. Overall, there is crossover support for public banking, besides Reagan Conservative, Kevin O’Leary, including the leftist site Jacobin, and Ellen Brown and economist, Michael Hudson, proponents of public banking, in that early 20^th Century populist tradition.

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