Kamalafornia

Joel Kotkin has offered a picture of Kamala Harris’s new administration. If such occurs, of course. He indicts her and the political powers in Sacramento and declares that she would do to America what she and those like her did to California.

Since we do not really know what Kamala believes, we are reduced to examining the consequences of her policy agenda, in California, which he calls Kamalafornia. 

The state, by Kotkin’s analysis, is a living, breathing calamity. It has suffered a series of losses, to the point where it has become feudal, with working class peons servicing plutocrats. It leads the nation in lost business and in poverty. 

For the record, Kotkin does not see California as a socialist paradise. He sees it as a return to feudalism.

And California has been losing its middle class:

Since 2000, this state of unmatched attractions has managed to lose a net 3.5 million domestic residents. Critically, it ranks toward the bottom among US states in drawing newcomers, who have always been the critical fuel for its economy. Many of those leaving, according to an analysis of IRS data, are middle-income families in their childbearing years; many are college graduates. Forget Harris’s youthful “vibe”: The state, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is aging 50 percent more rapidly than the nation—gradually ditching the surfboard for the walker.

Once upon a time, things were better in California:

California boasted a remarkably diverse economy that included not only Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but also some of the country’s largest banks, a highly diversified industrial sector, and thriving oil and aerospace industries that employed hundreds of thousands of largely unionized blue-collar workers. At the turn of the millennium, California job creation was well-distributed in terms of regions, job types, and incomes. This economy proved to be a powerful engine for upward mobility and social progress.

California was done in by over-regulation:

The progressive regulatory tsunami—notably on labor, climate, and energy—hammered all businesses outside the elite tech sector. Harris talks about creating an “opportunity” society by aiding small businesses, but according to the Small Business Regulation Index, progressive California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.

At the least, California is unfriendly to business.

Many large companies have simply picked up and left for other fields. A Hoover Institution report found that in 2020, California had only one-seventh the number of company-initiated capital projects than did the leading state, Texas. Since 2022, moreover, all the jobs created in the state were in government or supported by the public sector, while private employment dropped. With the state suffering deep budget shortfalls, even government employment is beginning to drop.

As for the Harris promise that her opportunity economy will produce good paying jobs for middle class workers, it has certainly not happened in California:

Increasingly, California fails to produce the mid-wage jobs that support families. The terroir of choice for tech billionaires, venture capitalists, and home to three of the world’s five leading tech firms, the state ranks near the bottom when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average. Since 2008, it has created five times more low-wage jobs than mid-wage ones.

Among the culprits are environmental regulations:

In this case, the state’s climate diktats are most to blame. Any industry that uses carbon-based energy is targeted, including ports and logistics industries. At the huge Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, regulations aimed at terminating gas-powered trucks endanger the jobs of the primarily Latino workers, as the port faces stiff competition from places like Houston, Tampa, and Norfolk, which impose no such rules. 

The results have been positively feudal.

California may be home to the highest number of billionaires. Despite its enormous wealth, it is also home to a third of the nation’s homeless people. The Golden State also suffers the highest share of residents living in poverty and the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state.

After noting that the poverty levels in California are unacceptably high, Kotkin adds this, a propos of making housing more affordable in her opportunity economy:

One recent study found the median family in San Jose or San Francisco would need 125 years—150 years in Los Angeles—to save enough for a down payment; in Atlanta or Houston, it takes 12 years on average. Even the skilled, unionized working class doesn’t have much of a chance. Not one unionized construction worker can afford to buy a median priced home in any coastal California county, according to a recent study by economist John Husing.

So, what would Kamala’s America look like?

Under her rule, America would look more like failing Europe than itself, with the same tendency to raise taxes, regulate, and destroy the material economy.

California has feudalized itself by embracing trendy woke policies.

Kamlafornians will focus on gender, abortion, and race—virtue signaling that doesn’t threaten oligarchic elites. Expect to see a push, either through Congress or the executive, for such California legislation as mandates for stores to have gender-neutral baby sections or for allowing children to change genders without parental approval.

To compensate, the government will get more deeply into the business of offering handouts.

Working and middle-class people might soon realize there isn’t much of a future for them in a national Kamalafornia. Rather than good jobs and affordable houses to buy, handouts will be the order of the day, expanding what Marx described as “the proletarian alms bag” for the increasingly economically irrelevant masses. In her campaign literature, Harris pledges vast sums for starting business and buying homes, but she places little emphasis on the economy that would sustain them. Ultimately, most would most face a property-less, serf-like future in a system that resembles, as one Silicon Valley wag put it, “feudalism with better marketing.”

California once represented aspiration. Today, the state seems more an avatar of national decline. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently compared California to the late, decaying Roman Empire, also characterized by low birth rates, ever greater regulation, and an ever widening class divide. Exactly right.

Better to be an informed voter. 

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