George Rebane
We have long pointed to the travesty of governance that has totally engulfed California over the past decades, and called out its failures which now have become a tidal wave of destruction. The Left has identified this effort as the misbegotten complaints of an ignorant clutch living isolated from the glorious realities that define the Golden State as the defender of Earth and succor of the poor and alienated. As the most recent years have demonstrated, these same people have doubled down on their most destructive policies, and are now determined to spread these across America. We have a government in Washington only too happy to oblige and force the nation to march in the footsteps of California.
Fortunately, there are still Americans who see the follies of socialism, and in their own words echo what has appeared in these pages. Unfortunately these same people are having a difficult time getting organized and become a more effective political force to oppose our headlong drive to socialism, that beguiling gateway to comprehensive collectivism. One of the respected national voices of this cohort is the historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson. Yesterday he assembled a compendium of California’s calamities – ‘Can California Be Saved?’ – that caught the notice of one of our readers – thank you Mr Tozer. For the record here is an abbreviated summary of Hanson’s points.
1. Crime rates in the state have reversed and are soaring due to the early release of recidivist convicts and the general disrespect for law enforcement that our administration has fostered across the land.
2. In the fifth year of our latest drought (these have occurred regularly over the ages) we suffer extra because Sacramento has not built additional reservoirs to conserve additional water for its additional population. Our legislators “prefer to designate transgender restrooms, ban plastic bags at grocery stores, and prohibit pet dogs from chasing bears and bobcats.”
3. Our state “California endures some of the highest gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes in the nation. Yet its roads and public schools rate near the very bottom of U.S. rankings.” And traffic accidents are up 13% in the last three years.
4. In LA with our highest population of illegal aliens “almost half of all accidents are hit-and-run where the drivers leave the scene.”
5. “California has lots of petroleum and natural gas”, and we used to set the pace in building hydroelectric and nuclear power plants. Today Sacramento’s idiots have made our electricity and gasoline prices “among the highest in the nation.”
6. California is following Detroit by “growing government it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return” and “obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises.”
And why has all this happened and why are the insanities proceeding apace? Hanson collects the causes.
1. “The cause is political. California is a one party state, without any serious audit of authorities in power.” Assembly – 52 Ds and 28 Rs; Senate – 26 Ds and 14 Rs.
2. All the state’s executive officers are Democrats as are overwhelmingly its delegation to Washington.
3. The once bipartisan purple has turned “bright blue” resulting in higher taxes and regs that have driven out small businesses and hundreds of thousands of middle-class voters to states like no-tax Nevada, Texas, and Florida.
4. Today the state is “devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor – the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.”
5. A third of America’s welfare recipients live here with a quarter of Californians living below the poverty line while the state boasts the most billionaires living in a “thin coastal corridor (that) has become a tony La-La land unto itself.”
6. The poorer in the interior “require ever more public services” for which the coastal rich don’t mind paying the “necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.”
7. Demographically California is young and dumb, fielding median age 35 voters who are easy targets for the socialist screeds.
8. California hosts the most illegal aliens and foreign-born residents who form ill-informed “immigrant groups (that) are likewise traditional liberal constituencies, at least in the early generations.”
9. Wealth in California is today made in “high-tech, social media, the Internet, government employment, academia, lawyering, and acting”, and not in “the old-fashioned way – mining, timber, ranching, farming, and construction.”
10. Today “Profits usually involve programming, investing, financing, hedging, talking, dealing, suing, instructing, and regulating.”
And today we add to this list the AB32 spawned green regulations and subsidized jobs which put another knot into California’s economy based on hysterical science politically subscribed.
Hanson finally asks if California could change back to a sustainable social order. I’ll let you read his ‘only if’ answers and see what you think. My answer remains a more doleful and dour NFW.
[24oct15 update] As if to rub in the above analysis of California’s self-inflicted woes, we now hear reports of our neighbor to the east experiencing a surge in businesses and manufactories establishing themselves there to enjoy a more conducive tax and regulatory environment. Reno is welcoming tens of new enterprises big and small that will use a nearby jurisdictional boundary to gain the best part of both worlds – Nevada’s pro-business clime and proximity to California’s high population markets. (more here) In fact, because of California’s socialists, things are so good in Nevada that places like Reno are shifting their economies away from being casino-centric to enterprises that will generate even more wealth, jobs, and tax revenues. Meanwhile the numbnuts in Sacramento, with approving nods from their know-nothing local lackies, continue putting forth more programs to perpetuate poordom that will be funded by our never-care coastal rich and our overtaxed, shrinking middle class.
For readers familiar with the Gini Index of wealth/income distribution, I leave as an exercise to draw the perverse shape of California’s Lorenz curve which our progressives are promoting as they continue to demagogue wealth inequality to our gruberized electorate.
But California’s liberal plague will continue as this bit of wisdom from Maxine will attest.
rebanesruminations.com 
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