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.

California's Big Problems in Higher Ed.

This is a nice summary of California's higher education bubble, in the days prior to its imminent collapse.

If you take a broader look at California, you will learn that things are hard all over.

The entitled classes ensconced within California's universities are matched by entitled classes at every level of California's state and local governments. It is unlikely that the people will stand for this nonsense for much longer -- particularly when dysfunctional government policies of spending, regulation, and taxation, are driving more and more profitable businesses and employers out of the state.

Video H/T Boots and Oil blog

Life in California: Not for the Easily Discouraged

I am including a long excerpt from Professor Victor Davis Hanson's latest PJ Media column. It details some of his struggles to survive in the face of a rampant parasitism settling over the "Golden State."

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following — mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chainsaw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it, and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it — an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized — all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside — in official parlance a “gang,” and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos” — like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out.

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant, who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house — carting off the refrigerator, dishwasher, stove, and microwave. But why? Do these miscreants wish a civilization of the sort that all houses must seem occupied all the time, or are otherwise considered “communal property” for the taking? Don’t the appliance thieves have homes, and if so, do they have locks on the doors to protect their investments from the likes of themselves?

...Highly paid and pensioned California teachers and professors are resembling bishops, knights, or rooks surrounded by a host of part-time, temporary, one-year-contract pawns, lacking the salary, security, and benefits of the kingpins. Yet the liberal establishment in education cannot continue in such an apartheid world of unionized winners and exploited subordinate losers, or public fiefdoms propped up by private toilers. It is a contradiction in terms, and there is no money to pay for it, despite the fiscal logic of its exploitation.

...I went to the warehouse local food store the other day, soaked it all in, and wondered: if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps? We are nearing 50 million recipients. So what will come next? Food stamp A; food stamp category B? Super food stamps? Can 100 million receive them? 150?... _VDH

California is a preview of coming attractions for much of "blue state America." Greece is already there, and much of the rest of "entitlement minded" western Europe is well on the way.

As for the readers of this blog, it should not require stating that your decisions over the next few years are crucial. And I am not referring to your decisions while in the poll booth, although one should be aware of the ramifications of his actions in all circumstances. No, your response to the general demographic decline of your society will determine at what level the re-building can commence.