The same old, same old California suicide

Many Californians wonder why taxes go up and services go down. The state suffers the same problems time and time again, yet does anything ever change? Victor Davis Hanson writes mournfully for the National Review. 

There could be a long answer to explain why California for years abandoned dead drought- and insect-stricken trees — over some 60 million of these withered, towering time bombs in their coastal and Sierra forests — to rot. But the short of it was that the kindling and tinderboxes were seen as perfect green mulch for flora and fauna.

Apparently, our ancestral, Neanderthal foresters once upon a time believed in the time-tried lore of removing dead brush, cutting down withered trees for needed lumber, and allowing grazing to clear foothills of dead grasses and low vegetation. But then again, the old-breed thinking has been seen as obsolete by today’s brilliant new progressive consultants, professors, and activists. They were too eager to implement a natural strategy of letting medicinal fires periodically burn forest fuel to remind us that millions of trees are not for living among, or logging or recreating amid, or for anything much human-orientated other than a week or so a year backpacking.

There could be a longer answer for why — when California is faced with existential threats of soaring taxes, the exoduses of its best and brightest citizens, crashing services, and biblical heat, smoke, plague, and fire— its officials obsess over reparations, raising property taxes, implementing a socialist “you didn’t build that” wealth tax, and jacking up top income-tax rates over 16 percent.

The more money the state gets, the more the services degenerate, and the more it needs. And because it has no answer for the existential crisis of millions of impoverished recent illegal immigrants (20 percent of the state lives below the poverty line, a third of the nation’s poor live in California), soaring Medical-subsidized health costs, unsustainable pensions, the largest homeless population in the nation, and hare-brained schemes like its fossilized high-speed-rail project, in expiation it seeks postmodern escapes from premodern threats.

So the rich got really rich, the poor came in and got a little less poor, and the middle fled either out of state or to the Sierra and coastal foothills that are now aflame. So California’s destruction can be summed up in the hypocrisies and paradoxes of its bankrupt elite, who believe that their money insulates them from their own toxic ideology, and their virtue-signaling squares the circle of feeling guilty that they want nothing to do with the millions of poor they invited in and are relieved that they drove out millions in the middle classes.

How long can a state suffer the rich Bourbons of the Bay Area? As long as its brave nobodies still drive ’dozers right into conflagrations to create lifesaving fire breaks, as long as its despised farmers continue to serve as the nation’s food basket, as long as unheralded pilots fly blind into smoke to drop fire retardant, and as long as there is something left for the parasitical elite of the rich inheritance from California’s brilliant and industrious but now long-dead past.

This article originally appeared in the National Review. Read the whole thing here.

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