Classical historian Victor Davis Hanson recently ruminated, and not for the first time, on the mess that California has become because of years of dysfunctional government. In the meantime, Hot Air notes that the Golden State is pursuing lawlessness on an epic scale by passing measures that defy federal Immigration Laws and to actually block federal law enforcement officials from enforcing the same. The question arises, what does one do about a problem like California?
California has an out of control government
Hanson noted in his article how the state government of California has become drunk on regulations, taxes, and spending.
To add insult to injury, the state is not spending on the right things like reservoirs to store water during droughts or repairing roads. Instead, Sacramento is entertaining itself by madcap projects like high-speed rail, climate change, and government run healthcare. Environmental regulations are killing the state’s once vibrant agricultural sector. Other regulations, such as minimum wage laws, are making it next to impossible to start a small business in California.
The result is that the state has become increasingly a feudal kingdom, with the population divided between the super-rich of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and a burgeoning underclass. The middle class, prevented at every turn from using the political process to effect change by a far left judicial system, is increasingly being squeezed.
Many are already fleeing the state for friendlier climes.
Needless to say, state and local governments in California are increasingly becoming defiant of federal law when it comes to illegal immigration. The situation has ominous parallels to the South during the Jim Crow era where civil rights laws were concerned.
How can California be fixed?
The political establishment of California seems unwilling to address the problem. Hot Air, perhaps in tongue in cheek, suggests allowing the state to secede and see what happens to it. Without the support of federal money, the state is likely to go off the cliff and would need massive efforts to stave off a calamity similar to what is being visited upon Venezuela.
California would then be readmitted into the Union but with conditions that would prevent such an occurrence as is happening now from ever happening again.
Short of letting California secede and then allowing it to collapse, saving the state when it is unwilling and even unable to save itself, will be hard. The federal government could assert control over immigration laws, even to the extent of arresting public officials who defy them. But fixing what ails California without violating federalism, which allows states a certain agree of autonomy over how they conduct their affairs, is going to be hard indeed.
