Socialism: If You Build It, They Will Leave

And the song remains the same, whether it’s playing on West Coast, as Victor Davis Hanson writes here at PJM…

The liberal model — borrowing huge sums, rigging interest and the currency to enable state profligacy, turning large swaths of the population into less productive unionized government workers or dependents on the dole who vote in thanks to political hacks — simply does not work. How could beautiful blue-state California lose almost a millions refugees to arid Texas? I like Texas, but Dallas had far less of nature to work with than did San Francisco. (It takes a lot of human failure for thousands to give up verdant California to move to Utah or the Nevada desert.) What we are witnessing is nothing short of surreal: in the manner that Tijuana was a different universe from San Diego, so too the entire state of California is becoming a different world from its neighbors. Whether one examines its near dead-last schools, its oppressive income and sales taxes, its decaying roads and infrastructure, its absurd prison system, its dysfunctional state offices (try the DMV), or its priestly public employee caste, California is becoming Detroit.

…The Midwest, as a new article at City Journal on Chicago as “The Second-Rate City” notes…

Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. Chicago is also being “Europeanized,” with poorer minorities leaving the center of the city and forced to its inner suburbs: 175,000 of those 200,000 lost people were black.

The demographic disaster extends beyond city limits. Cook County as a whole lost population during the 2000s; among America’s 15 largest counties, the only other one to lose population was Detroit’s Wayne County. The larger Chicago metropolitan area grew just 4 percent—less than half the national average. What little growth Chicagoland had, then, was concentrated in its exurban fringes, belying the popular narrative of a return to the city. And even that meager growth resulted almost entirely from new births and immigrants, rather than domestic migration: over the decade, the Chicago metro area suffered a net loss of more than 550,000 people to other parts of the country.

…not to mention Detroit, as Kevin D. Williamson spotted in his article in a recent print edition of National Review (which may be behind the subscriber paywall)…

At some point, Governor Snyder and the people of Michigan will have to deal with reality: Detroit’s political leadership is a parasite that has outgrown its host. People are leaving Detroit as quickly as they can: Well more than 200,000 have left the city since 2000, and more than 1.5 million since 1960. Which is to say, Detroit’s refugees since 2000 could form a city bigger than Providence, Salt Lake City, or Des Moines. Those who have fled since the city’s peak could form a municipality bigger than any U.S. city except New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, or Philadelphia.

…And the East Coast:

New York [state] lost a net 1.6 million residents to other states between 2000 and 2010, according to 2010 Census data. The domestic migration outflow, coupled with a slowdown in foreign immigration, ensured that New York’s share of the nation’s population continued to slide in the first decade of the 21^st century.

But hey, even though “The net worth of the American family has fallen to its lowest level in two decades, according to government data released Monday, driven by a more than 40 percent drop in their stakes in their homes,” the private sector is doing fine, right Mr. President?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwsHRHPcSSU

(By the way, nice piece of jiujitsu for Team Romney to use the Obama’s Palace Guard once again to make the case, as the video concludes, that Obama Isn’t Working.)

Related: Roger Hedgecock, the former mayor of San Diego, writes that “California is Obama’s Dream” — and he’s not talking about the sushi. As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the passage quoted above, “in the manner that Tijuana was a different universe from San Diego, so too the entire state of California is becoming a different world from its neighbors.” The same far left mindset that dominates Sacramento similarly causes Obama’s White House and his loonier proponents to seem like they’re living in a different universe than the rest of us.