Posted by Tina
My thanks go out to Pie for directing us to the Daily Beast article, “California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude,” by Joel Kotkin. I’m bringing it to the front page so we can better discuss the fate of the state many of us have cherished as home. California was once the sixth greatest economy in the world. It was a land of abundant opportunity in technology, farming, entertainment, energy, and recreational industries. California was the wave of the future. Unfortunately if that is still true the future looks pretty dim.
California is among the states that have a high median income of $60,000. California is also among those states with “inequality above the national average of .39, indicating both their very large populations, their very complex ethnicity, and large metropolitan economies rich in high income earners, entrenched concentrations of poverty, and high levels of immigration.” Inequality is now greater in California that it is in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana,” and is among the states with the highest poverty rates. California is home to one in nine billionaires worldwide.
I don’t have a problem with California being home to billionaires. I have a problem with a state whose government is hostile to investment and business. Let’s look at the trends that have led California into rapid decline: high taxation and regulation on business, hostility toward the bread basket area of the Central Valley, radical regulation on land use, stridently strict regulation on energy production and use, failing schools, and single party control in government and in the public education system. The elitist ruling classes of California are inspired by leftist radical ideology and extremism. They have embraced the communal model of Marx and left the American ideal of freedom supported by the rule of law in the dust. Power, control, and wealth at the top and redistribution to the masses. The more their ideas are implemented the more middle class and poor Californians are delegated to serfdom, her children left without hope.
The Daily Beast article is one for the record books. I highly recommend it, depressing as it may be.
More and more, the state of Jefferson sounds mighty appealing!