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No one has done a better job of analyzing California’s
decline than Professor Joel Kotkin. No one has done better at showing how the
blue state model of governance has failed in California.
And yet, Kotkin admits in the Wall Street Journal today that he voted for the current governor,
Jerry Brown. He adds that he is a “Truman Democrat,” meaning, I surmise, that
he is now on the road to recovery.
This political season has brought us a number of phony “wars.”
Today, Kotkin analyzes a real and often overlooked war, one he calls: “the progressive
war on the middle class.”
It begins with what Gov. Brown and his “green cadre” call
their: “’smart growth’ plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing.”
Kotkin is rightly outraged to see the rich and fortunate living very high while wanting everyone else in the state to live in substandard “workers’ housing.
As an aside, we should add that this has been tried before.
The German architectural movement called the Bauhaus did design workers’
housing after the war. Tom Wolfe told the story masterfully in his book, From Bauhaus to Our House.
Wolfe explained that it did not work out very well. The
experiment in aesthetic socialism ended with the destruction of many of the
more famous projects. Modernist architecture brought out the worst in everyone
who lived there. No one felt at home, and eventually everyone moved out.
California’s progressive war against the middle class does
not stop with housing policy. It extends to an effort to green the state.
Kotkin notes with regret that Jerry Brown actually believes all the “green
stuff.”
Allysia Finley summarizes Kotkin’s views:
Housing
is merely one front of what he calls the "progressive war on the middle
class." Another is the cap-and-trade law AB32, which will raise the cost
of energy and drive out manufacturing jobs without making even a dent in global
carbon emissions. Then there are the renewable portfolio standards, which mandate
that a third of the state's energy come from renewable sources like wind and
the sun by 2020. California's electricity prices are already 50% higher than
the national average.
Oh,
and don't forget the $100 billion bullet train. Mr. Kotkin calls the runaway-cost
train "classic California." "Where [Brown] with the state going
bankrupt is even thinking about an expenditure like this is beyond
comprehension. When the schools are falling apart, when the roads are falling
apart, the bridges are unsafe, the state economy is in free fall. We're still
doing much worse than the rest of the country, we've got this growing permanent
welfare class, and high-speed rail is going to solve this?"
High speed rail makes some cultural sense; unfortunately it
does not make economic sense. Apparently, Californians feel inferior to the
Europeans who have networks of high speed rail. They are suffering from Europe
envy.
Government policies have driven up the cost of living in
California to the point where the middle class is being forced to flee.
Finley writes:
A
worker in Wichita might not consider those earning $250,000 a year middle
class, but "if you're a guy working for a Silicon Valley company and
you're married and you're thinking about having your first kid, and your family
makes 250-k a year, you can't buy a closet in the Bay Area," Mr. Kotkin
says. "But for 250-k a year, you can live pretty damn well in Salt Lake
City. And you might be able to send your kids to public schools and own a
three-bedroom, four-bath house."
According
to Mr. Kotkin, these upwardly mobile families are fleeing in droves. As a
result, California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are
the "entrenched incumbents" who inherited their wealth or came to
California early and made their money. Then there's a shrunken middle class of
public employees and, miles below, a permanent welfare class. As it stands
today, about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on
Medicaid.
Even high-tech is beginning to move out.
Finley summarizes Kotkin:
Take
Salt Lake City. "Almost all of the major tech companies have moved stuff
to Salt Lake City." That includes Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle.
Then
there's Texas, which is on a mission to steal California's tech hegemony. Apple
just announced that it's building a $304 million campus and adding 3,600 jobs
in Austin. Facebook established operations there last year, and eBay plans to
add 1,000 new jobs there too.
She adds:
As
progressive policies drive out moderate and conservative members of the middle
class, California's politics become even more left-wing. It's a classic case of
natural selection, and increasingly the only ones fit to survive in California
are the very rich and those who rely on government spending. In a nutshell,
"the state is run for the very rich, the very poor, and the public
employees."
Of course, no one is going to shed a tear for California.
Its citizens are getting what they voted for. Being responsible for your own
decisions is central to democratic governance.
And yet, considering how big California is and how poorly
its finances are being managed, how long will it be before the nation is called
on to bail it out?
When casting a vote in a national election one does well to ask which candidate is more likely to answer the call.
1 comment:
The Wall Street Journal interviews demographer Joel Kotkin, who speaks in despair of the ruin of California that has been leading more people in recent years leave the former paradise state than enter it. California’s decline is driven by a large set of leftist government policies and social factors which Kotkin describes, including insane anti-business measure in the midst of a fiscal crisis. But some of these—such as tight controls on development, and the growth of the welfare class—have obviously been driven by mass Third-World immigration, the very immigration that Kotkin, in past decades, idealistically and aggressively championed. His desire was to change America from the historical Anglo-European nation which he disdained into a multiracial, multicultural society. But in his WSJ interview, he doesn’t acknowledge any connection between the immigration he applauded and the deadly social and political problems he laments.
As Kotkin wrote with co-author Yoriko Kishomito in the late 1980s, the mass influx from Latin America and Asia into the U.S. represented, not a departure from our history, but its fulfillment, a typical line of open-borders propaganda:
Nor is this [demographic and cultural] transformation contrary to American tradition, Throughout our history, America’s racial and cultural identity has been in constant flux, reacting to each new wave of immigration. Today’s immigration, primarily from Asia and Latin America, continues that pattern…. From its earliest days, the U.S. has always been something of a “world nation.” [quoted by me in The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, 1990.]
Indulging in his imperial fantasies, Kotkin even presented Alexander the Great’s attempt to create a multicultural empire as the model for America to follow.
Kotkin, in short, is another destructive liberal Jew, who walks down the street while houses collapse behind him. He then turns around, is shocked by the spectacle of ruin, moans, “Oh, this is terrible,” and it never occurs to him that he had anything to do it.
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