« Sunday Morning Book Thread 08-23-2020 | Main | First-World Problems...Part Kakskümmend üks »

The Future Of America Can Be Seen In California, And It Is Poor, Nasty, Brutish And Short

The Dead Kennedys song, "California Über Alles" wasn't supposed to be a guide book, but it is strangely prescient, albeit a few years late. They sang about Jerry Brown being a totalitarian, but the song applies quite well to Kamala Harris, who's a vile combination of police state excess and socialist destruction of upward mobility...at least for you and me.

Don't believe me? Just take a look at California, which in just a generation has gone from a state with endless possibilities to a calcified wasteland of the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor.

Kamala's America?

By virtue of being chosen Joe Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California has reasonable odds of becoming president someday—and probably better odds than the average running mate, given Biden’s advanced years and sometimes shaky public presentation. That’s cause for concern, not because she represents, as some conservatives fret, the far Left but because she will promote the spread of California’s increasingly feudal political and economic order, which undermines the upward mobility that long defined the California experience. [emphasis mine]

"Go West young man" wasn't just a tossed off quotation. Horace Greeley was serious, and he was correct (even if he didn't actually say it). But today's California is a testament to the worst excesses of American progressivism gone mad, complete with Byzantine rules for doing almost literally everything. Build a business? Be prepared for years of regulatory hell. Feel like building a house? Good luck! Want to clear the brush around your house so it doesn't burn? You might go to jail!

What California's political and business leaders want for you is quite simple...become a ward of the state, and let them make the social and economic decisions for you, because you are just too stupid to do it correctly, and besides, they don't want you becoming wealthy and moving into their neighborhoods.

Rather than seek to democratize and boost competition within the economy, many tech leaders embrace expanding the welfare state, a position that resonates with Democratic activists. Former head of Uber Travis Kalanick, Y Combinator founder Sam Altman, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk all favor this form of top-down socialism, where a publicly funded guaranteed annual wage helps soften the worst effects of “disruption” on an increasingly redundant workforce. In a sense, the tech mavens have embraced the old aristocratic practice of offering what Marx called a “proletarian alms bag”—not just with guaranteed wages but also with free health care, free college, and housing subsidies—to a growing property-less class. The growth of a permanently dependent citizenry violates the aspirational character of the American republic, as would become more evident if Harris attains the helm.

I had never seen the phrase "proletarian alms bag" before I read this article, and it is both illuminating and terrifying, because that is exactly what the current incarnation of Karl Marx (the Democrat Party) wants for America.