The news that California’s state legislature will adopt carbon trading, a.k.a. cap-and-trade, serves as another warning for a state about to fall off a cliff. California has an immense regulatory scheme and high taxes that have contributed to people and jobs leaving the state. Everyday conversations now feature questions about what the country might do if California or any other state goes bankrupt. In San Francisco, they are banning Happy Meals. The Democrats of California keep voting for more Democrats, and therefore the same policies that have led the state to this disastrous predicament.
Yet for all the state’s attempts to regulate, there are places within it where people live in what seem like uncivilized communities outside the apparent reach of the vast government. Victor Davis Hanson writes about these parts of California as he has spent a few weeks traveling the state and making observations. One cannot help but feel some combination of shock and sadness to read experiences like this:
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.
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Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?
Hanson recognizes the underbelly of California, and contrasts it with the issues that progressives and elites of the state instead focus on. Voters could have begun to change course in November like much of the country opted to do, but instead voted for more of the same. There is now a Democrat governor in place, increasing the likelihood that the legislature will address its fiscal problems with higher taxes, and its perceived environmental problems with systems like cap-and-trade.
These ideas may make the elites happy, but the state will continue to crumble unless the real problems are addressed. Right now, there are indeed two Californias.
The Gov. has done a lot to try and cut spending.