George Rebane
Last night Jo Ann and I attended the SoJ town hall meeting at the GV Elks Club. This meeting was announced here, and it drew a full house. The well-organized gathering was set up by the NC SoJ steering committee under the very able leadership of Eddie Garcia. I even noticed that Jim Firth, head of the NC Democratic Party and candidate for the GV City Council, was in attendance. Eddie later told me that he had personally invited Mr Firth to attend, and I commend him for his attendance (although I did notice that his participatory gestures did not exactly track the sentiments of the rest of the crowd).
The speakers – Messrs Mark Baird, Terry Rapoza, and ‘Red’ Smith – were again excellent and informative. The audience’s response was enthusiastic and frequent. The SoJ movement is all about the lack of representation that California’s northern counties suffer in Sacramento. Our state legislature is dominated by southern California and progressive coastal interests that are inimical to the welfare of the state’s rural and mountain counties. But a more complete treatment of the arguments for separating out the SoJ have been covered in these pages and are also available on the SoJ website here.
SoJ opponents have advanced a number of specious and erroneous arguments as to why pursuing such a separation is not only a fool’s errand, but will not work for a number of political, constitutional, and economic reasons. Most of these have been easily dispensed with on the SoJ website. The procedural one of getting the separation through Sacramento will probably be most difficult, but doable if the Democrats can be convinced of the win-win benefits from allowing the new SoJ. The federal approval should be pretty much pro forma with a Republican Congress.
But I do have a concern that I have not yet heard raised and which doesn’t deal with the feasibility of separation, or even the political and economic viability of the newly formed State of Jefferson. My question is about the political sustainability of a successfully launched SoJ. Let me explain.
Years back California provided the exact same social (given the racial inequities of the time), political, and commercial environment that is intended for SoJ – in fact, most of the country was so blessed. From the Great Depression onward the Golden State began to attract millions of newcomers seeking a better life, many of them arriving with a jaundiced view of capitalism and free enterprise (recall Upton Sinclair ran for governor in 1934). More – some still enthralled with various forms of socialism and communism – arrived after WW2 and settled in the coastal cities. In the 1950s even more easterners arrived to enjoy California’s climate and growth, especially in the aerospace industries funded by Cold War federal spending.
There was so much money flowing into and in the state that no one paid much attention to how much Sacramento was getting and what position of ‘policy leadership’ the state was assuming in its social welfare programs that always seemed to one up the concurrent growth of federal programs as the 1960s arrived. More and more Californians were augmenting their income through various government transfer programs. And that acted as a magnet for a different kind of immigrants until the state was firmly in the grip and also on the tip of the national progressive movement. But in the late 60s there were still parts of California that were home to people who believed in self-reliance, entrepreneurship, minimal government, fiscal prudence, strong property rights, and personal freedoms. These were primarily the state’s rural and mountain counties. However, with the growing tsunami of Great Society programs, more and more money had to be sent to Washington and Sacramento first, before it was returned to local governments, each dollar arriving with its own thick ‘user’s manual’ of how it could be spent.
And with that began the arrival of people with their transportable transfer payments. These folks understandably wanted a change to a life in the mountains with forested hills and clear running rivers that were far from the smog, traffic, crowds, and crime of the big cities. Now they could do it because their checks came to wherever they were, and the local governments near their new homes had to provide them with what they received in the cities. However, the problem was that as the years approached the turn of the millennium, many (most?) of these people arrived with their progressive beliefs and instincts intact. They never understood what they had done to the places they left, they just wanted to do it again in the places where they settled.
The result is what we see today. Many of the northern counties, especially in the foothills, suffer from more than just a tinge of socialist blight as the progressives have voted in local boards and councils that reflected their various collectivist ideologies that always included a more encroaching and expensive government, regression of property rights, ecological nostrums limiting access to public lands and imposing added expenses on sparsely populated jurisdictions, and on and on. In short, they had soiled their former nests and now were in the process of soiling their newly settled lands.
So here’s the question for all of us who look forward to a fresh start with SoJ that will return to the good parts of our constitutional heritage and history of the formerly golden state.
What measures, if any, can be put in place in the formational documents and subsequent laws/ordinances of SoJ and its counties that will prevent the progressive blight from overtaking and, in short order, again spoiling a new inviting territory that is minimally regulated, commercially vibrant and growing, financially stable, with a good climate and scenic beauty, and all of it nearby just for the taking?
rebanesruminations.com 
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