California — has any American state ever gone from being a beacon to families and aspiring entrepreneurs to being a warning to the world so quickly?
I can’t immediately track down where I saw the quote, but Ronald Reagan, who used the Golden State as a springboard for virtually his entire career, first as an actor, then governor, then president, said that if the Pilgrims had landed in California, they would have never left to explore the rest of America, so rich were the state’s natural resources and so welcoming its year-round climate.
After World War II, California beckoned for millions of Americans. Back in October of last year, in one of her last articles for Commentary before she decamped to the Washington Post, PJM alumnus Jennifer Rubin beautifully described what moving to, then living in the state felt like in the 1960s through the 1980s. It’s also the title of this post:
When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California…” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness.
In a real sense, even in 1968, California was the wilderness. If the cost of air travel was prohibitive for a family of modest means, they usually drove, and from the flatness of the Midwest they found themselves left speechless by the vision of the Rocky Mountains, rugged coastlines, wide beaches, and empty space they knew only from the movies. Like emigrants leaving the old country in the 19th century, they often arrived friendless and unaccustomed to the habits of their new environment. Public transportation was in scarce supply; instead there were gleaming freeways with five lanes on each side. Tie and jacket? More and more restaurants didn’t care. Informality pervaded dress and speech at a time when, back east, adults still commonly addressed acquaintances as Mister and Missus.
In Southern California, the aerospace industry was booming, and middle-class professionals from all over the country flocked to work in and around it. The movie studios had fallen into distress and decay due to the growing popularity of TV (before the blockbuster era of the 1970s drew audiences back out of their living rooms), but if you went to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, you might spot the billionaire in a corduroy jacket whose name was above the door escorting Cary Grant around his collection. Every now and then you’d have a Fred Astaire or a James Stewart sighting.
In Northern California, Haight-Ashbury was still awash in the haze of the Summer of Love from the year before, the hippies and the gay community were moving in on the old Republican establishments of San Francisco and Berkeley, and San Jose was a sleepy town where a family of modest means could own a four-bedroom house near terrific schools for $27,000. Silicon Valley was farmland.
Forty-two years after I arrived in California, the very notion of an affordable, happy-go-lucky, optimistic, and “golden” state seems otherworldly. Its financial condition resembles Greece’s. Self-dealing and political scandals involving public-sector unions have become commonplace not only in Sacramento but also in cities from Mexico to Oregon. Thirteen percent of the state’s workforce is unemployed. Taxes (sometimes disguised as “fees” or “special assessments”) are among the highest in the country, school days are being cut, and state universities have cut off financial aid as they squeeze out in-state residents in favor of higher-paying out-of-staters.
In his latest column at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson describes how reprimitivized it particularly feels for some of the smaller towns outside of suburban regions such as the L.A. and San Jose area. “In the vast rural expanse between the Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield,” VDH writes, “our rural homes are like stray sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm:”
I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.
Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?
The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?
In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.
The Catholic church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment.
In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism. After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw the fabricator’s Internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not act as they do?
I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s.
A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader. They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken everything we have.”
If California’s farmers have it rough, entrepreneurs endeavoring in other businesses in the state are suffering as well, Steven Malanga writes in the new issue of City Journal, summing up the state’s attitude towards business as “Cali to Business: Get Out!”
Last year, a medical-technology firm called Numira Biosciences, founded in 2005 in Irvine, California, packed its bags and moved to Salt Lake City. The relocation, CEO Michael Beeuwsaert told the Orange County Register, was partly about the Utah destination’s pleasant quality of life and talented workforce. But there was a big “push factor,” too: California’s steepening taxes and ever-thickening snarl of government regulations. “The tipping point was when someone from the Orange County tax [assessor] wanted to see our facility to tax every piece of equipment I had,” Beeuwsaert said. “In Salt Lake City at my first networking event I met the mayor and the president of the Utah Senate, and they asked what they could do to help me. No [elected official] ever asked me that in California.”
California has long been among America’s most extensive taxers and regulators of business. But at the same time, the state had assets that seemed to offset its economic disincentives: a famously sunny climate, a world-class public university system that produced a talented local workforce, sturdy infrastructure that often made doing business easier, and a history of innovative companies.
No more. As California has transformed into a relentlessly antibusiness state, those redeeming characteristics haven’t been enough to keep firms from leaving. Relocation experts say that the number of companies exiting the state for greener pastures has exploded. In surveys, executives regularly call California one of the country’s most toxic business environments and one of the least likely places to open or expand a new company. Many firms still headquartered in California have forsaken expansion there. Reeling from the burst housing bubble and currently suffering an unemployment rate of 12 percent—nearly 3 points above the national level—California can’t afford to remain on this path.
You can see that punitive tone in a microcosm in this quote from Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor, which Steve Green found recently:
If the Occupy people really want to make a point about the 1 percent, then lay off Oakland and go for the real money down in Silicon Valley.
The folks who work on the docks in Oakland or drive the trucks in and out of the port are all part of the 99 percent. They take our goods from all over the state and export them.
The only thing those cats down at Apple are exporting are our jobs. Then they have the nerve to ask for tax breaks, and Washington obliges.
As Steve writes, “There is no golden goose that any California politician wouldn’t gleefully hang, draw, and quarter for the sake of fifteen more minutes of power.” And yet Sacramento wonders why entrepreneurs are fleeing the state.
But hey, cheer up! For it’s all downhill from here. “Look around you. From now on, it gets worse,” Mark Steyn warned this year in After America:
In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.
“After America”? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called the “United States,” but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to “unite” it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.
In Reagan’s epochal “Time for Choosing” speech nearly half a century ago, he said:
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And it’s slipping away fast. In some regions of America, much faster than others.
Update: Welcome readers clicking in from:
California, where capitalism goes to die…is basically Greece with bad traffic and newer ruins.
Pension and union corruption, far leftist Marxist gunk gumming up nearly the whole of its economy, the ACORN infused collapse of the real estate industry and the green monster devouring resources, a Hollywood that hates success in business as much as the military, and borders so porous …the “second ecnomy” in the state is bigger than nearly 30 other states.
Most of that money gong to other countries, but the expense staying right here in the state that is basically a barren cupboard.
They starved farmers of water but manbearpigs are saved for posterity.
The good news is that the Ninth Circuit protects everything but the Constitution, a writing for which they seem to have no affinity or respect.
If it had Indiana’s weather, it would be a ghost town already.
Family and friends who live in California keep encouraging me to relocate there. Ain’t gonna happen. My small business is already being crushed by taxes and fees. Voluntarily relocating to an even higher tax state is out of the question.
Meanwhile, here’s another Reagan insight: “History will record with the greatest of astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”
One might ask, “with friends like that, who needs enemies?”
As a california resident, i will say that you are wise to steer clear of this state.
Winter is coming.
Mr. Stark, those outside California do not fear the cold.
The “best” weather ALWAYS produces lazy, unproductive and indolent societies. There appears to be no life challenge, no sense of something to overcome, just an insipient laziness and worthlessness that kills civilization and work ethic. Couple that with Democrat welfare addition (which is stronger than Heroin or Meth) and you get California.
I dunno, the Romans had a pretty good run, and the weather is/was quite nice in much of the old empire. Even the Spanish had a pretty good couple of hundred years. The US South is doing pretty well compared to much of the rest of the Country, though having been born and raised there I’ll admit that the climate does easily give rise to a certain indolence only partially mitigated by air conditioning. I think wealth and welfare are a lot more damaging to initiative than climate.
I live in a state with a very harsh climate that loves to extoll the virtues of wilderness hardiness, but the reality is that thirty-odd years of being oil-financed trust fund babies has created a tremendous amount of indolent dependency and a youth culture right out of “A Clockwork Orange.”
This is a wise insight.
Suffering and struggle produces good qualities in people and societies.
California – what Barry’s 2nd term will look like. High unemployment, bi-lingualism, huge 3rd world, under-educated illegal alien population, lax immigration enforcement, most everyone on some form of govt subsidy.
Obama 2012!
“Then the armored divisions of Genghis Bubba crossed the border and established the iron law in his new protectorate of California.”
Well, there’s still Singapore.
With respect to VDH’s observations—that’s what you get after telling 2 generations of people that they have a right to other peoples’ things. They figure they have that right and help themselves, not making fine distinctions about the government being the intermediary.
“2 generations”?
It would be less troubling that that was the case.
The Progs in CA have been spinning this tale since the Dust Bowl (see the law on “attractive nuisances” and how that overcomes property rights).
CA is the Modern Goebbels State, where the lie is the law.
The CIO in AFL-CIO actually stands for Congress of Industrial Organizations, the far more leftist, once and now-again communist dominated side of the labor movement that includes the big wall-to-wall unions like the Autoworkers and Machinists, of which there once were a lot in California. So much so that it was once joked that CIO actually stood for California Improved Okie.
WWII turned CA from a largely conservative agricultural state into an industrial economy dominated by the most left-leaning unions in the Country. The docks long had communist dominated longshoremen and the San Franciso consulate of the USSR was the center of KGB activity spying on the atomic and aerospace industries and, later, fomenting civil rights agitation and student opposition to US foreign policy. And we wonder how CA got to be in the mess it’s in?
Los Angeles hired more than 4000 workers between 2003 and 2008: just kept hiring. It 2009 it woke up to a 400m deficit. But it had “union rules” that prevented layoffs. If LA laid off some workers from a bargaining unit, it had to pay a 23m penalty.
Our local paper, the Los Angeles Times, felt that was just fine and encouraged him to hire more of them and not lay anyone off. “in the long run we’re all dead” intoned a regular writer for the Times.
Meanwhile our Photo-Op mayor cut ties with electrically generated power in Utah–it was coal fired you see. Now we will use “green” sources that will send the cost of electricity up by more than 40%. But businesses will I am sure ignore that.
Our mayor knows nothing about electricity, roads, or business. He thinks raising taxes is easy because “someone will pay it,” since all is static, and there to be touched without effect. He is a perfect politician for an age with libraries that toss out old biographies of Churchill and stock instead multiple copies of “Madonna.”
Our state employees retire early, with pensions spiked by endless deferred vacations days, sick days and salaries swollen by things like paying prison guards to walk from the parking lot to their post. Businesses are relentlessly hounded by lawsuits alleging that employees who left 2 years ago didn’t receive a 10 minute rest break, or had to work “overtime” and of course no one has records to disprove it because no one videotapes employees departing after work. Our governor is a quirky man, with some honor, but he too is bought and paid for by Unions. State employees want to retire at 55, with pensions I pay for, and that I might have to work to age 80 to pay for it all is no concern of theirs.
This is all so embedded I doubt it is possible to remove. California will wither, and the productive will flee, as they have no choice. Only welfare cases, state employees, state supported businesses and fools will be able to live here.
It’s not just the unions that are the problem. We have, in California, one of those silly programs for educating young children. This one’s called “First Five California” and the intent is to teach pre-schoolers to read. I guess the attitude is that they’re not going to learn to read in school, so we should teach this when we can, even before. Anyway, Los Angeles has its own local branch of this organization, and they hired a woman to run it at an exorbitant salary. She did a crappy job, losing a bunch of money which neither she nor anyone else could account for. We’re talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. As a result, after some time her supervisors decided to get rid of her, but didn’t quite have the nerve to out-and-out fire her…they just demanded that she resign. That’s all well and good, but she petitioned a state administrative law court, claiming that since she hadn’t voluntarily resigned on the one hand, and hadn’t actually been fired on the other, she’d actually been laid off. The result: the county had to pay her $1.5 Million in severance, as per her employment contract with her employer (us).
So she was incompetent, cost us a bundle of money, and the solution is to pay her $1.5 Million to go away. Does anyone want to bet that her replacement will be no more competent, but that the bosses will avoid firing them for fear of another fiasco like this one?
Often those sorts of payoffs are just a scam to give somebody a payoff, often also with the understanding that some of that payoff best find its way back to the politicians that caused it. A lot of the labor arbitrators who practice in Alaska also practice in Democrat controlled cesspools like CA, WA, and OR. We had to very pointedly let them know that when we took a case to arbitration we weren’t doing so we could launder money to the union and blame the arbitrator. It got so bad with one CA based arbitrator who was just insisting on a split the baby decision to give the union a little something even though the State was 100% right, that I finally had to come in and do a sidebar with him and the union rep in which I told him that if he gave the union what it was asking for, they’d get it when I ran out of courts to appeal it to and if I lost in court, I’d claim I didn’t have the money for it and ask the Legislature for a specific appropriation so I could go over there and trash him and the union in legislative hearings on funding the award. He and the union got the message, but that demonstrates how inured to that sort of corruption those who practice labor relations in CA are. I don’t know what they’re doing now, but while I was there, we’d pretty much gotten rid of all the CA based arbitrators on our panels, but the rot was still there because the whole West Coast, including to a large degree Alaska, has been Californicated.
If there’s a “union rule” that limits a public employer’s ability to lay off employees for lack of work or lack of funds, it is there because it was given to them by feckless politicians who probably took a lot of union money for their election. That’s the insiduous part of public employee bargaining; if the union doesn’t like what the management is doing, it can just go out and buy new management. In Democrat controlled, union states, that would be all but two or three of the union states, the public and the taxpayers are NEVER at the bargaining table; the union is bargaining with people that it bought and paid for. Even the grievance/arbitration process is just a charade to launder money to the union and then back to the Democrats.
A lot of the union abuses you write of are not unique to CA or even to unionized public employees, but rather are creatures of federal law. Until 1986, public employees were not covered by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and its overtime and minimum wage provisions. In ’86, in a graphic example of how bad facts make bad law, the USSC handed down Garcia v. San Antonio which had the effect of making all public employees subject to the FLSA and there has been a run on state and local treasuries ever since. Slick Willie Clinton’s DOL and DOJ were more than happy to help employees, especially unionized employees, pick their employer’s pocket, often as you say on the basis of the employees naked assertion that they’d worked. A lot of it was done by Democrat governments who were happy to sign off on DOL consent orders funnelling millions to unions and employees, of course with the understanding that a sizeable chunk of that money was to find its way back to the Party and the polticians who made it possible. The FLSA is a 1938 law that is so vague that you only know you’re violating its finer points when the ALJ or the court tells you that you did, so you’re always working without a net in applying it. It really doesn’t at all fit the modern white collar workforce nor does it fit 24/7 operations like police and fire very well. You don’t want to think about what wildland firefighters are being paid, for example. As to the COs, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association is probably the most powerful single public employee union in the Country and at times they’ve simply owned CA. I sat with Swartzenegger’s head of labor relations for the corrections department as he lamented over drinks having to go appear before a Finance Committee, the chief aide for which was the head of CCPOA off on leave from his corrections job and his union office so he could work for the CA legislature. Any unionized state including mine can do corruption pretty well but that one was almost beyond belief. In any event, they don’t get paid to walk from their cars in the parking lot but rather from the first secured gate and it isn’t unique to CA; it stems from the federal Portal to Portal Act which was actually intended to help miners and such who often had very long lift or train rides to the mine face, and their pay only began at the face. So, once they walk inside the gate, they are engaged to the employer and it must count as time worked if it takes more than 7 minutes, IIRC, from the time they are engaged or clock in to the time they reach their designated work station. The same law applies to any employee public or private, but only in the public sector and the unionized private sector do you have a union hovering around to rigorously enforce it and only in the Democrat controlled public sector do you have politicians willing even eager to pay it without a fight. Just Google FLSA and you’ll be inundated with law firms just ever so happy to help you pick your employer’s pocket. There is good potential for relief for the core functions of governments, those that are clearly not involved in commerce, to get out from under Garcia and in the early days there was some success in the federal districts and a circuit or two. That all stopped with Clinton and nobody took it on that I know of during the Bush Administration. That was probably because most of the damage had already been done during Clinton and there wasn’t much left to fight about other than the very radical move to get out from under federal authority altogether, which act would bring down the wrath of the unions and the DOJ/DOL, even though DOJ/DOL were nominally under Republican control. Unfortunately, GWB did like most Republicans and only applied a thin veneer of Republican appointees and left the agencies largely in control of the Democrats.
VDH: “…Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them…”
Is that even a question? Of course they think that way.
A good third or more of our country wants a big fat goose for dinner RIGHT NOW, and doesn’t care if it has been laying golden eggs.
They’re all devolving like children of broken marriages; spoiled and undisciplined.
Worse times are coming soon.
Just got back from Lake Tahoe. What a beautiful state but what a mess.
1) California is becoming Mexico. Ever been to Mexico? How did Mexico get the way it is? Did Mexican’s have any thing to do with it? I have no problem with people migrating legally to the USA, but the Mexicans are not just migrating to American they are bring Mexico along with it. They think it is their right.
2) Public sector unions are the real greedy bast*ards.
Character is destiny, and the character of a nation is its culture.
Mexico is what Mexico is because Mexicans are what Mexicans are.
A functional culture leads to a functional and prosperous nation. A dysfunctional and diseased culture leads to a nation with those same traits.
Look south of the border and what do we find?
There are many Mexicans who are fine and decent people on an individual level, but as a nation and a culture Mexico is horribly broken, and it isn’t going to get any better.
The genius of America is that we have always been able to absorb people coming from broken cultures, such as the Irish, and purge them of their dysfunctional nonsense in only a few generations. But with so many Mexicans invading illegally, to the point that most food labels are dual-printed in Spanish, I fear that this may not be possible this time around. There will of course be many Mexicans who rise to the challenge of being Americans, prosper and succeed, but there will also be a persistent underclass of Mexicans who can’t or won’t acting as an albatross around our necks and providing the left with a read-made “victim” group to manipulate and exploit.
The Irish weren’t broken but actually oppressed, even unto starving, unlike fake oppressed people from all over the globe for the last 30 years. In any event, if a comparison between 1840s Ireland and modern Mexico were thrown into the arena of native ingenuity, I’d say it’s a toss-up.
Yes I’d hire an Irishman from the dawn of the Victorian age over a modern Mexican in a tech factory based on reputation alone.
How could anyone expect California to somehow avoid becoming a version of Mexico–with its lawlessness, immorality, and vicious fighting–while allowing unlimited and uncontrolled immigration from Mexico?
I am in California, and the descriptions are true, the outlook is grim.
All I can say is that it truly reflects the will of the people. They may not be yearning for the outcome, but they demand the pathway. Every defect, no matter how minor, is a sign to the peoples that more government / spending is needed.
Thus it is not the evil inherent in socialism that is depressing to me; it is the willingness of a “free” people to submit.
My wife and I pulled up stakes and left Cali’ a little less than two months ago …not to retire, but to work elsewhere …I was born in the Sacramento Valley six decades ago, and lived and worked in California my entire life.
I just didn’t see how such dysfunctional government, at every level – along with an electorate that continues to elect such inept bumblers – was going to be able to pull itself out of an accelerating decent into economic suicide.
…especially after the last election (when they chose to elect Jerry Brown – the root cause of the policies that wrecked the state in the first place); I just no longer believed they’d even try.
He who ignores history is doomed to repeat it.
But an entire electorate …gone terminally stupid …it was too much.
Time to leave.
————
Yeah, we had to leave a lot behind …but I have a few productive work years left; and we’re already assured we’ll do okay in our new home.
Sixty …and starting over. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
Jerry Brown was a poor choice, but Meg Whitman was an even worse choice. She clearly had no idea what to do except throw more money at a bloated and bureaucratic university system that is ripping off young people and burdening them with huge debt. She would be pushing tax increases and compromising the few Republicans left in state congress that are holding the line on tax increases.
What Calofornia needs is a coup d’etat.
The problem in Commiefornia isn’t the people in charge, but the people who put them in charge.
The great thing about Democracy is that the people always get the government they deserve. The bad thing about Democracy in such cases is that we get it too…good and hard.
One irony of the situation in California is that many (although not all) of those who are now fleeing the state helped to create the situation there in the first place. They voted for the gold-plated education bureaucracy that teaches children only how to be good Stalinists; they elected Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer and other hard-left political hacks; they pushed “green” policies (until those policies took a bite out of their own hides); they supported unsustainable union pensions; they blocked much-needed power generating facilities.
And now, when they arrive in Utah (or Texas, or Arizona, or wherever they run to) they immediately try to establish the same failed leviathan state they fled. Thus the cancer of California spreads.
“And now, when they arrive in Utah (or Texas, or Arizona, or wherever they run to) they immediately try to establish the same failed leviathan state they fled. Thus the cancer of California spreads.”
I have to say the above quote is so very true. After the 88 earthquake, the exodus to the pacific northwest was on and these people came in force. When they arrived they wanted to fix it up just like the place that had been ruined with well intentioned social largesse. Rather than assimilate into a better civic environment that was not dysfunctional, they tirelessly yearned to recreate all that was comfortable and awful from their previous surroundings. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and it happens one little compromise at a time. We gave into the twisted logic of the do-gooders without ever taking an honest realistic look at what was really the actual outcome intended. The civic aspirations of these folks were myopic and juvenile at best. I find more and more people in this mindset react to problems with a willingness to impose a new rule on yet more people without regard to the big picture. Those who aspire to “do something” in response to the ills of society err badly. Aspiring to do something versus aspiring to do the correct are not the same thing. Not even remotely. Some feel those who do these “somethings” are worthy of praise and adulation. I say not so! Endeavoring to do anything but that which produces the correct result is nothing more than wasted effort. “Doing something” is really nothing more than a dressed up version of what most of us call failure. Do-goodism taken to its logical conclusion offers nothing more than an expansive tapestry of petty tyrannies. Pay close attention because this is where we are headed folks.
rssg,
You forgot to mention armed conflict.
I’m astonished that people still think that California’s public universities are a net plus for the state. The public universities are now institutions of the radical left. All students are required to attend courses that teach race/class/gender grievance. All students must learn the canons of environmentalism and social justice. The principal mission of the public universities is no longer education – it’s to manufacture millions of graduates indoctrinated with far left ideology. And it’s only going to get worse.
California’s public universities are actively hostile to Republicans and conservatives in general. There are no registered Republicans serving as as the president of any state college or the dean of any school (e.g., medical school, law school, etc.) There are few, if any, registered Republicans serving as department heads (e.g., head of the math department, English department, women’s studies, etc.)
California’s future is being shaped in large part by its institutions of higher learning. Conservatives have ceded public universities – and the future – to the far left.
As an outsider, it seems to me that the Mormon-dominated state of Utah is coping better than most, for obvious reasons even if you don’t agree with Mormanism. Which I don’t.
Saying that, maybe Mitt Romney is not so bad as the likely Republican nominee. He, and his spiritual organisation know how to stand up and defend themselves. Were he to be President, it could translate.
There seems to be no Christian organisation that can stand up for themselves and govern. I’ll take Mormanism over Islam any day.
I have a good friend, a former Mormon and now a house-church Calvinist bent on recreating the 1750s in a beautiful stretch of Southern California mountains, who considers that Mormonism’s theological oddities are less relevant to its culture, than its having essentially preserved its New England Puritanism in amber across two centuries.
There’s a lot of truth to that. Sure, there’s all the stuff the evangelicals freak out about — but Mormons spend, in my experience, much less time thinking about that, than they think about the cultural practices inherited from their New England ancestors.
I am a born and bred Californian and I am thoroughly despairing of finding a job with my industrial engineering background. I would hate to leave all of my family and friends behind, but there is simply no place in this for someone who wishes to make big things. The Powers that be have decided that California shall be clean and fair and managed regardless of cost.
It is not an accident that California went from so rich to bankrupt. I would imagine that much the same thing happened in New York: unguided markets created vast wealth and /almost/ ideal lives (at least compared to the state of damn near the entirety of human experience). Along came Managers who saw they were in spitting distance of Utopia, and they took the reins and started spitting. All we are left with now is the mess.
To get my gust, reread The Lorax by Dr. Seuss but reimagine the beautiful environment as the freer market days and the Onceler as the central planner types. The result is the same.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” —
Robert A. Heinlein
The California I inhabited and loved had a first-rate educational system, Silicon Valley, the entertainment industry, aerospace, etc., etc.
A juggernaut, indeed. Optimism was everywhere.
Then millions of East Coast liberals moved to the state. They proceeded to import millions of illegal aliens. The Democrats they elected proceeded on a spend-and-tax program to make everyone dependent on the state and to use taxpayer money to pay off supporters.
They succeeded, alas. Two terms of Brown the Nightmare sealed the deal.
Now California is New Jersey + Mexico City.
High debt. High crime. High corruption. Pessimism is everywhere.
Sorry, Founding Fathers and ancestors, your legacy has been either squandered or corrupted.
“If the Pilgrims Had Landed in California, The East Coast Would Be Wilderness Still” Ronald Reagan
What businesses the fatal regulatory climate doesn’t chase out of California, the trial lawyers do. I’m a civil-defense lawyer in Southern California and I see it first hand. The trial lawyers pump billions into Democrat coffers. In return they get laws making it easier to recover damages against business. The courts are hostile to business, making every business an underdog in any lawsuit, no matter how frivolous. California’s Unfair Competition Law enables any trial lawyer to sue businesses on behalf of huge classes that generate little for the consumer but millions in attorney fees. California’s anti-discrimination laws and minority-majority population enable trial lawyers to earn big money suing landlords for discrimination for every sensible rule enforced to maintain a quiet and clean environment in rent-controlled buildings. Employers and lawyers are voting with their feet: employers move to Texas and lawyers move from Texas to California. Soon enough, California will be exclusively populated with rich limosine liberals, public employees, trial lawyers, and illegal aliens. But the only thing left to sue will be the state government.
The rot begins and ends at the local level, with unions and other takers swarming sparsely attended local elections. The first, simple fix for California: move all local elections to the federal/state biennial calendar, or at least to a statewide June/November odd-year calendar. The hodgepodge of local elections seems designed to favor only the most organized factions, usually the takers.
CA isn’t the only state with that problem. Having local elections on the second Wednesday after the third Tuesday after the full moon is in Jupiter just gives elections to public employees and those with their hooves in the trough. At the state level, my state is thoroughly Republican, though we do have the accidental Democrat US Senator brought to us by the USDOJ, but liberal, union owned Democrats own all the city governments and I think it is because of the weird dates and low turnouts for local elections.
California is a life lesson in what happens when the left wins. When they win, everyone loses.
Mwalimu Daudi @ 15:
For a life-long Californian (well, ex-Californian) I’ve got a shockingly right-leaning voting record. For Pres: Reagan x 2, Bush x 2, Dole, Bush x 2, McCain.
Having recently moved to Spokane Washington I keep a copy of my voting record as a Californian handy, just to prove, if anyone asks, that I’m not one of the buffoons responsible for destroying CA in the first place.
Our country is heading in the same direction as California, very sad.
Yes, but is the teachers’ union happy? Because that’s all that matters in California.
Mwalimu Daudi,
Thanks for the warning. When I finally leave California, and take my still (barely) profitable business with me, I shall avoid Utah, if your attitude is commonplace. I’ve also been denounced by enough of my fellow conservatives in the Lone Star State that I have no expectation of any kind of friendly welcome in Texas, either.
James W. Please avoid the Midwest and South too. Californians are notorious for decrying how their State sucks and then when they leave that hellhole, they IMMEDIATELY set about transforming their new digs into the same hellhole they fled. I personally saw Colorado absolutely destroyed by Californians in the 80′s and 90′s. Don’t pollute any other State with your California disease. If it’s reached the point where even Californians can’t stand it any longer, please jump off some bridge somewhere. You’re getting what you wanted and voted for as a State.
We call it Californication and you people ruin every place you go. You run from the damned place then try to rebuild it wherever you settle. We just inherited some property in CA and sold it immediately for what little we could get. I didn’t even want to go down there to deal with it for fear some CA would rub off on me.
Lester: don’t blame Mexico for Californians choosing to poop their own sheets.
We’ve got tons of Mexicans here in Texas, too, and you know how you can tell if a Mexican owns a house around here? Their lawns are effing **perfect.**
Ed, thirty years ago, give or take, my grandfather — the first Preston Green — gave a speech to the Association of Steel Distributors. It was titled, “Once Upon a Time There Was a Land Called America.”
Back then, it seemed too dire. But in California it’s already happened.
California’a Republicans must accept some of the blame for this. A lot of people are fiscally responsible but support abortion. Why do the California Republicans still aend out pro life candidates when they have no chance of winning.
It might have something to do with that pesky right to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” that some old pale stale white males once wrote about. Note which comes first in that list.
Not to mention “..and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…”
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sfaa/pdf/california.pdf•
“In 2008, there were 522
abortion providers in California.
This represents a 23% increase
from 2005, when there were 424
abortion providers.”
Do ya think that there may be some lost human potential here? It is not only lawyers who are proliferating in CA. It seems to me that it is the poor and uneducated that have litters of children and the more affluent self select out to maintain their standard of living.
Just think, as people leave the traffic should get better. LOL
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Edmund Burke
California is serving as a perfect example of the end results of Obama’s and the Democrats policies. Our culture should learn from California’s suffering.
You forgot to add in the “Ron Paul-racist newsletter” angle into this piece.
Jennifer Rubin supports mass immigration yet she wonders what happened to California!
Vox Day is also astonished by her ignorance – Failing to note the obvious
I think we all can agree that Obama is the Carter of our generation, I think we all need to hope and pray that the president we elect in 2012 will strive to be the Reagan of our generation. We need someone who will remind us that Americans are exceptional, not because of who we are, but because of who we strive to be, that no matter how bleak things look, We The People, not the government, will find a way not only to get us out of the current mess, but keep advancing.
I think Steyn is correct: shanty towns, probably first in Calif. and then Texas and around and around. I agree that in 20 years there will be tracts of them.
What happened to Calif? Above all the Third World happened and that’s the long and the short of it. No surprise the most liberal state is facing the most ruinous result of its own political correctness.