AUSTIN, Tex. — Call it the season of Texas’ discontent. Of course there was Hurricane Harvey, which blasted the coastline, leaving cities flooded and an estimated $180 billion in damage. But Harvey is just the headline.

There’s also the dysfunctional, ideologically driven State Legislature, which spent the last weeks of this year’s session debating, of all things, who gets to use which bathroom. Then there’s the oil and gas sector, which, as it has so many times before, expanded into a bubble and then, as global energy prices sank, popped, taking thousands of jobs with it.

Texas’ woes are interconnected. Rising energy prices allow politicians to take their hands off the legislative wheel. Less attention to smart, controlled growth at the state and local level allowed unchecked sprawl along the coast. And now declining revenues will make it harder for the state to address its very real needs, assuming the Legislature can get its act together. The silver lining to this tale? It finally seems to be dawning on people that low taxes, less regulation and more oil are no substitute for actually governing.

If this doesn’t sound like the Tall Tale of the Texas Miracle of just a few years ago, that’s because it’s not. Way, way back — in early 2015 — Gov. Rick Perry rode out of office with his head held high: The boom years had created over 1.4 million jobs since the end of 2007. We had escaped the housing bust, oil and gas prices were rising and the state’s economy had diversified and profited mightily from free trade. Texas was the promised land, reminiscent of Davy Crockett’s observation that our state “is the garden spot of the world.” At the height of this latest Texas miracle, the cost of living was so low and there were so many jobs that 1,000 people flocked here every single day.