California: From Falling Down to Flying Away
The beautiful but broken Golden State
A 1991 op-ed in TIME offered a prophetic warning:
“The whole world would be wise to pay close attention to the drama of incipient decline and resistance now unfolding in California, for the future that begins there tends to spread across the world.”
Three decades later, that “incipient decline” has lead record numbers of businesses and productive residents leaving. The ghosts of 1991 remind us that California’s current state is not merely the result of a few bad bills in Sacramento; it is the final act of a long, willful neglect of the constitutional firewalls and civic foundations that once protected the Republic. A population incapable of calculating the compounding interest of its own debt is a population incompatible with a free Republic.
From Falling Down to Flying Away
Just two years after that TIME piece, Hollywood released a dark commentary on the state’s fraying nerves: Falling Down. We watched an ordinary defense worker abandon his car in a traffic jam and embark on a crusade across a decaying Los Angeles.
While we need not worry about billionaire venture capitalists losing their shit at a ‘Whammy Burger’ like in the movie, the underlying frustration remains. Today’s most ambitious “makers” have realized that the State is now governed by a class that gets rich solely by presiding over decline.
Hollywood, of course, cast the fed-up main character as the villain - a decision that, in retrospect, looks like the industry digging its own grave. They were so intent on pathologizing the breaking point that they missed the signal for the noise: the very civilization that built their soundstages was being liquidated by the same policies they championed. Politics truly is downstream from culture.
For the last 30 years, California culture slowly rotted away. In modern California, you are more like to find children in the government schools filing remedial math than water in the hydrants. If you are a builder, a ‘maker’, you will certainly find a suffocating regulatory regime and a legal system engineered to favor the ‘takers.’ The zombie-like citizenry seems aloof; a population incapable of calculating the compounding interest of its own debt is a population incompatible with a free Republic.
Threatened by confiscatory taxes and a bloated bureaucracy, today’s frustrated citizens simply opt to fly away. California’s rulers view the exit of these ‘makers’ as a tactical victory; the clearing of the board for their utopian ambitions. They don’t mourn the loss of diversity; they celebrate the departure of dissent.
Nowhere to Run
To the refugees self-deporting to Texas or Florida: fleeing a burning house provides a reprieve, but not a remedy. You cannot outrun this fire. The architects of California’s decline have no intention of letting their failure be measured against a successful free-market benchmark. They intend to burn not just the house, but the entire neighborhood.
To hide their failure, California’s rulers must export it. They cannot allow a benchmark like Florida or Texas to exist. They intend to light the match in Sacramento specifically so the fire spreads to Austin, Nashville, and Miami. Wherever you land, their comrades will be waiting.
Beautiful But Broken
The ‘takers’ long, slow march through our institutions is complete in the Golden State. To restore California to its status as the ‘Promised Land’ for America’s best requires a wholesale reform of every single institution. We need inspiring, selfless leaders to begin the arduous task of rolling back the architecture of the administrative state in its entirety.
Eliminating fraud, restoring integrity to elections, and ensuring an educated citizenry require brave souls willing to pledge “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to serve. Without them, California will become Italy or Brazil - beautiful, but broken.
Can California turn course? Not without her best engaged in the restoration.
