One Thing Of Which We Can Be Certain; When Given A Range Of Options, California Always Chooses The Worst One

Sometime in the not-so-distant future it might behoove America to build a fence around California, because if this level of nuttiness and stupidity and total and complete ignorance of reality and human nature leaks out we are in big trouble

Another Bad Idea in San Francisco

Before Covid-19 struck, San Francisco officials took no meaningful action to address the squalid conditions under which so many homeless people live. They threw money at the problem, but the problem grew. Homeless activists and some city leaders have argued that living on the street is a right, but today it presents a serious public-health dilemma: how will officials get homeless people to comply with social-distancing requirements, and what should they do with those who’ve contracted the virus?

But with Sino-Lung-Rot's threat to the homeless population, San Francisco has a new problem, and as usual they have discarded the more rational ideas such as housing them in Moscone Center, and moved on to a monumentally bad idea...

Instead, Mayor London Breed and the Human Services Agency came up with the plan to route over 3,000 people currently living in shelters and navigation centers into hotels. The city is planning to put thousands of physically and psychologically sick people into private hotel rooms, in some of the most luxurious hotels in San Francisco—the InterContinental, Mark Hopkins, and The Palace. Occupants would receive three meals per day, hygiene products, and access to nurses.

It is so typical of California, and San Francisco in particular that a problem among a small segment of its population can be solved (I use that word very loosely) only by inconveniencing, endangering, and impoverishing the vast majority.

Crime running rampant? Decriminalize many things so there are fewer criminals! Some unknown fish is threatened? Destroy the most productive agricultural area on earth. Housing getting expensive? Make it almost impossible to build anything quickly through a maze of regulations and restrictions, so housing becomes even more expensive!

I could go on and on, and the Californians in our midst will no doubt be able to provide even more insanely stupid examples.

But...what is the goal? Is it to turn California into Venezuela on the Pacific? Because if that is the case they are doing well. The socialist goal of flattening society's strata is already happening. California is losing its middle class, and will soon be a state of 39,000,000 poor people, most of whom receiving some sort of government assistance, with 500,000 wealthy people scattered around in their gated enclaves.

And it needn't be so. California is fabulously wealthy...oil, minerals, agriculture, industry, and is also an amazingly beautiful place, which adds tourism to the mix. The saddest thing is that it wasn't always dysfunctional. Aside from San Francisco and a few other outliers, California was, until the 1990s a vibrant energetic place in which the tone was that you could do anything if you just worked at it.

Now? My sense is that Californians cling to their memories of what it once was...enjoying the leisurely life of the ocean and the deserts and the mountains and the vineyards, and carefully ignoring the decay that is all around them.

It is unsustainable, and the exploding homeless (bums, vagrants, addicts mostly, with very few truly homeless) problem is simply the most obvious signal. When it fails is the question...not, "if."

[Hat Tip: Jay Guevara]

posted by CBD at 12:15 PM

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