George Rebane
Lenin promised Russians a workers’ paradise, the rest is history.
California’s progression toward socialism has long been acknowledged by both the Left and the Right. The state is known globally as America’s leading laboratory of collectivist programs and practices. Leftwing media around the world celebrate California’s ‘leadership’ in all things progressivist. Leading publications and documentaries detail how the state has grown its reach into all aspects of life within its boundaries. Huzzahs of approval and encouragement echo from liberals in other states and countries who wish their own jurisdictions to follow such exemplary leadership.
The Right, of course, takes a completely different view of what has happened to the once Golden State. They point to statistics like the state having taken the lead in the downward dive in education, in the creation of the nation’s largest welfare class, in piling tax upon tax and regulation upon regulation that denies its citizens the use of both public and private resources, in inviting the worst of federal diktats to land and establish themselves first on its Left coast, and, of course, in driving start-ups and business expansions to friendlier regions and shores.
The Left sees none of this and points to the clatch of coastal high tech businesses whose climatephilic and highly educated workforce cares little about the marginal taxes they pay to live and work in such a selective paradise. The tax revenues from the owners and workers of such politically correct high density, low polluting enterprises that easily succumb to Agend21’s ‘stack and pack’ are skewed beyond correction, but who cares – ‘we haven’t crashed yet’. The implied deeper message is that “we don’t need no” water-consuming agriculture, thriving and unreliably voting middle class, and small self-sufficient communities, especially in places where only low-density native Americans lived that now should be ‘returned to Nature’.
But the powers that be do need a dependent and reliable voting class. This has been easiest to create out of the growing cohort of systemically unemployed workers, and the corporatist class of siliconized workers and billionaires – both of them dependent on the government gun to keep their checks coming. The only thing left to do to create the perfect progressives’ paradise is to domesticate or eliminate those pesky right-wingers, capitalists, and small entrepreneurs. These people are easy to spot since they like to live in the soon-to-be-forbidden low density regions like the state’s rural counties.
And the program to do that is well under way. The public schools have now pumped out two generations of correct thinking citizens who are statists to their (now Common) core. They are encouraged to flood California’s hinterlands to gain control of local governments and ferret out the remaining knuckledraggers and Bible thumpers. And when the time comes, these coastal immigrants will compliantly emigrate back to the approved ‘stack and pack’ communities connected by subsidized public transport, electric cars, and bicycles.
California’s economy, education, and politics have been owned by the Democrats for at least half a century, with the occasional token Republican or RINO governor sworn in now and then when the road to socialism has hit a noticeable rough patch. But even these palliatives will not be necessary as more and more Californians become beholden to the Golden Leviathan. Today’s insane public policies that plague our state are too numerous to recount here – however they do adorn past years of these pages. Among the most recently surfacing travesties from decades of decadent leftwing rule is California’s ‘water shortage’ that has been politically compounded to serve many purposes.
The long and short of it is that the Left mandates the continual release of enormous amounts of fresh water into the ocean, claiming to protect the environment at all costs to agriculture and industry while shipping water south and continuing to fight the construction of more water catching and conserving infrastructure. The state operates on infrastructure built to satisfy the needs of about half of today’s residents, an infrastructure that takes no count of the historical droughts that have visited the region for countless millennia. The rest of this story is summarized well in the recently published ‘California Faces Lost Decades in Solving Drought’.
Today in California the evils of socialism are manifest wherever you look, you cannot avoid it. And that is another example from the last great century of Man.
[2dec16 update] A reader sends updated data on the states’ indebtedness. The details are chilling. The Daily Caller report states that –
… some states are busted, with sluggish economies, while others are busting loose with growing economies and more opportunity. The reasons for both aren’t hard to find, they’re all in the numbers.
Take California and New York, for example, two states that have had big-spending governors and legislators for decades. Based on data compiled by statedatalab.org and Open The Books, residents of both states may want to prepare for hard times ahead.
California has $328 billion in debts, compared to only $94 billion in assets, for a deficit of $234 billion. If debt holders all tell state officials to pay up in 2016, every Californian will have to pay an additional $20,800 in taxes.
The careful reader will pick up that there is little chance that this debt will be made good from added taxes piled on already sky high state taxes and fees that must be generated from a limping economy that has no chance of reviving under the planned socialist nostrums, especially those involving environmental diktats and ‘green jobs’ imposed under the government gun. When the music stops, the dollar will be destroyed and the retired public employees (including teachers) will be SOL. In the meanwhile we will suffer under ever stifling mismanagement from Sacramento of which we are reminded daily as we travel on California’s dilapidated roads while witnessing the impact of historically reliable droughts, increasing rolls of welfare recipients and ingress of illegal aliens, and broken K-12 educational system that turns out a reliable supply of ever more ignorant voters to accelerate the vicious cycle. (more here)
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