Who Needs California?

California is drowning in debt and suffocating in green regulations and mandates. Walter Russell Mead says that this is a bad thing, because both America and the world need a strong, vibrant, prosperous California. Here are his thoughts:

The destruction of California isn’t a victimless crime. Millions of low income California residents are trapped in decaying cities where, thanks in large part to narcissistic green unicorn chasers, the manufacturing base has withered away. And anything that blights California, blights us all. America and the world need California back on line; the Golden State has too much to offer for anyone to remain indifferent to its fate.

In the long run, California is too richly endowed and its people too dynamic for the self-defeating policies of the green elites to prevail. Either the governing class of California tires of unicorn hunts, or at some point the people of California will get tired of their governing class. And in any case, the current suicidal policy mix means that sooner rather than later, California will run out of the money needed to maintain the illusions of its governing elites and the whole elaborate system of sham and deception will blow away. _Walter Russell Mead

Mead is reacting to this piece by Joel Kotkin, in which Kotkin describes how the green agenda is destroying the economic base of every jurisdiction in which it is enacted.

Green anti-energy and anti-private sector policies are indeed slowly destroying Germany's economic base, and are a painful thorn in the side of Australia's efforts to remain prosperous. President Obama has tried to bring the same impoverishment and destruction of opportunity to the entire US, but his success in creating failure is most pronounced in the state of California.

Mead's defense of California overlaps with Robert Kagan's defense of the US. California is unique among American states, and the US is unique among world states. The lefty-Luddite green destruction of opportunity in both the US and California would be a serious loss to the world at large.

This brainless green agenda is driven mainly by leftists in several sectors, including academia, the news and popular skankstream media, the faux environmental industrial complex, the sprawling leftist political activism networks, and a large cluster of well-to-do "we know what is best for you" financiers and promoters>

This agenda -- in truth -- would like to see a reduction in global population from its current 7 billion people, down to between 100 million and 700 million people. In other words, this agenda does not care about you, your dreams, or your loved ones. It is a blind agenda that dreams of mass death and a great downfall of human industrial civilisation.

Who needs California? Who needs America? Who needs free and prosperous people, with the liberty to follow their dreams? Not the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast faux environmentalist movement. If it were up to them, you -- and all of the above -- would drop dead.