Battle for California Is the Battle for America

The Golden State’s progressive feudalists have one fatal weakness: They are wrong. The fundamental premises they use to justify their actions are flawed.

Via American Greatness By now, this is a familiar story. California is a failed state. Thanks to years of progressive mismanagement and neglect, the cities are lawless and the forests are burning. Residents pay the highest prices in America for unreliable electricity. Water is rationed. Homes are unaffordable. The public schools are a joke. Freeways are congested and crumbling. And if they’re not still on lockdown or otherwise already destroyed by it, business owners contend with the most hostile regulatory climate in American history. It is understandable that conservatives in the rest of the United States would be happy to write off California. But California is not writing off the rest of the United States, and therein lies grave danger to American prosperity and freedom. What if California doesn’t implode, a victim of its own political mismanagement? What if California instead completes its transformation into a successful plutocracy, run by a clique of multi-billionaires in a partnership of convenience with environmentalist extremists and backed by the power of a unionized state bureaucracy? What if the people who would resist this tyranny leave, and the remaining population peacefully accepts universal basic income and subsidized housing? What if all it takes to be a feudal overlord in progressive California is to proffer to the proletarians a pittance of alms, while reliably spouting incessant, blistering social justice and climate change rhetoric? Why won’t that work? After all, it’s worked so far. California has the most progressive electorate in America. Not because of California’s regulatory state, but in spite of it, California is by far the wealthiest, most influential state in America. With 40 million people, a diverse economy, and a gross domestic product of $3.2 trillion, California is almost a nation unto itself. And the progressive zealots who run California have been acting like an independent nation, with the avowed goal of transforming the entire United States to match its image. What happens in California matters to the rest of the United States because California’s internal market is huge, its political and financial influence is powerful, and it rallies political allies throughout the U.S. If what California does to transform its own culture and economy isn’t stopped, the rest of the U.S. will fall into line. The result will be a comprehensive reinvention of society in all areas, political, economic, and cultural. The difficult reality that conservative Americans must accept is that while California may be a failed state by the standards Middle America has come to take for granted, California may not fail by its own standards. The society California is building may prove viable, even if it is hideous to contemplate and morally wrong. It may prove viable even though the alternatives that it displaces offer more prosperity and freedom to more people. It amounts to an all-powerful tech plutocracy ruling over a micro-managed, dependent population, with rationing and redistribution in the name of social justice and saving the planet. The Labor Movement is the Glue At the forefront of California’s populist progressive movement is organized labor. Assimilating the progressive battle cries on all the predictable topics—race, gender, climate change—California’s labor movement wields both their billions in dues revenue and a perpetually mobilized field army that reaches into every locale and institution. And in a major escalation of a battle soon to rage across America, California’s unions have taken on independent contractors. Environmentalist Extremism In 2006, California passed AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act.” Signed by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, AB 32 empowered the unelected bureaucrats on California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) to regulate CO2 emissions in California with the goal of reducing them to 1990 levels by 2020. Since the passage of AB 32 there has been an unceasing flow of follow-on legislation, executive orders, and CARB regulations. To name just a few: Cripple the Housing Industry, Destroy the Suburbs In all aspects of what Democrats now market as the Green New Deal, California’s state government has led the way. This is vividly expressed in the critical area of zoning for high-density housing, based on the largely unchallenged assumption that suburban sprawl results in higher per capita greenhouse gasses. By cramming nearly all new home construction into the footprint of existing cities, the price of entitled real estate in California has become artificially inflated. But that’s just the beginning of the ordeal facing developers. Along with higher-priced land, home builders have to contend with costly building codes (such as requiring “zero net energy” homes), excessive fees, and uncertain, prolonged delays in gaining approval to begin construction. The result of California’s restrictive policies is that it has become impossible for unsubsidized developers to build and sell affordable homes. Make Basic Necessities Unaffordable The consequence of California’s excessive, environmentalist-inspired policies is to make the state unaffordable. It comes from a fundamental worldview that California uses all of its cultural influence to reinforce in America and across the globe: Austerity is necessary to save the planet. This goes all the way back to Jerry Brown’s “era of limits” philosophy which he promoted during his first terms as governor back in the 1970s. The basic necessities of life—housing, transportation, energy, and water—cost more in California than anywhere else in America. This is because of artificially imposed scarcity, a choice that is entirely avoidable. Along with making it impossible to profitably build affordable market housing, California no longer makes significant public investments in energy, water, or transportation infrastructure—preferring instead to redirect available funds to public employee pay and benefits. They justify this by claiming they are protecting the environment, but the real winners are the special interests. Destroy Public Education There is one area where California’s influence is felt every election cycle in the rest of the United States, and it comes courtesy of California’s unionized public education system. California’s public employee unions collect and spend over $900 million per year, mostly from member dues. More than half of that, nearly a half-billion per year, comes from public education unions, chief among them the California Teachers Association. The leadership of these unions are willing to spend hundreds of millions every election cycle to support Democratic candidates and causes. Everywhere. With California’s cities and counties and school boards almost universally dominated by California Teachers Association-approved Democrats, along with both houses of the state legislature and all higher state elected offices, the teachers’ unions have money to burn in the rest of the United States. And that’s exactly what they do, sending out millions to swing close elections to the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and state offices around the country. Foment Identity Group Tension Fundamental to California’s progressive culture is the deconstruction of meritocracy. It’s all an illusion, of course. No start-up that aspires to be Google or Facebook’s next unicorn acquisition expects to achieve such glory by hiring incompetent programmers. But the institutional drive towards erasing colorblind, genderblind criteria has progressed further in California than anywhere else in the United States. For any corporation still doing business in California, these policies have enterprise-wide impact. Just last month, for example, Newsom signed AB 979, which requires publicly traded corporations to “appoint directors from underrepresented communities to their boards.” A close reading of this law reveals the brazen, punitive arrogance of California’s Democrats, exemplified by the announced fine of $100,000 merely for “failure to timely file board member information with the Secretary of State.” Health and Safety Mandates The COVID-19 lockdowns may have grabbed the headlines, but California has been going off the deep end in pursuit of health and safety for decades. A good example is Proposition 65, the “Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act,” sold to voters in 1986. This is the California law responsible for cancer-warning signs so ubiquitous that most Californians know it’s better just to ignore them. In bars and restaurants, on playground equipment, shoes, umbrellas, and golf club covers, even around Disneyland, consumers are warned that a product served on the premises—even the place itself—“is known to the state of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm.” While most Californians have gotten used to these warning labels, they are no laughing matter. They expose small businesses to ruinous lawsuits.

The Battle For California Is the Battle for America

But again, it’s not just coffee or weed killer. California’s long reach is far more ambitious. What we drive, where we live, and how much we pay for basic necessities—all of these questions are destined to be answered with far more restrictions making everything far more costly, if California’s policies are successfully exported to the rest of the United States.

The Battle for America is the Battle for the Future of the World

California’s plutocrats don’t just have their eye on America, they want to conquer the world. For them, progressive feudalism is the political economy of the future, enabling them to preside over a reduction in the quality of Western lifestyles and individual freedom and a leveling of wealth around the world, while exponentially increasing their own wealth and power.

Once they’ve taken over the United States, they may face a reckoning with the progressive electorate and militant cadres that were their enablers on the ground, but it wouldn’t last long. By then the technology-driven police state will be perfected, with limitless access to robots, slap drones, nanobots, cyberware, and precision pathogens offering effortless control of even the most restive populations.

Meritocracy is the only way a free people can create an efficient, prosperous, opportunity society. Without it, nobody has any incentive to innovate or work hard. The capable and hard-working become cynical and resentful, while the incompetent and the indolent know they don’t have to step up, because they can live for free.

Capitalism is not dangerous, it is the engine of progress. It has been conflated with corporate monopolies and financial speculators. What a free nation does is use thoughtful regulations to amputate the gangrenous appendages of capitalist corruption, the predators and the gamblers, leaving the pure and competitive heart of capitalist competition to thrive.

What is at stake in California is not just California. It is the future of America. It is the future of the world. ... . Full Article By Edward Ring @ American Greatness