Will California Crack?

California has been the jewel in the crown of the United States for over a hundred years.  Throughout the Great Depression Dust Bowl Okies travelled across country looking for salvation in the Golden State.  And afterwards throughout the second half of the twentieth century California was the capitol of modernity, innovation, affluence and optimism.  It grew at an astonishing pace both in wealth and in population for what seemed like forever.  And it reaped the rewards of this growth when Silicon Valley become the engine that powered not only California’s economy but the whole country through stock ownership in companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

But in the last decade that has all changed.  California’s policies on almost every aspect of life in the Golden State have conspired to put an end to that growth.  The cost of everything from groceries to gasoline have skyrocketed and the cost of owning a home is preposterously out of the reach of everyone but the truly wealthy.  For that reason alone, the exodus of Californians to red states like Tennessee and Texas has been large.  So much so that for the first time ever the state has lost representation in Congress.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Even the enclaves of the absurdly rich around Los Angeles and San Francisco are beginning to suffer from violent crime to an extent they’ve never experienced before.  And the lower income areas are becoming no-go zones for vulnerable older people and women.  The effect of all this is to begin unravelling the fabric of normal life in the state.  Shoplifting of less than a thousand dollars of merchandise has essentially been decriminalized and so drug stores and other retail businesses are moving out of the urban areas.  District attorneys and prosecutors refuse to prosecute property crime and even some violent offenders.  And so, the police have essentially stopped arresting them.

Encampments of homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens have mushroomed across the cities and with them has come crime, violence, filth and disease.  Taken along with all of the other dysfunctional policies of the state like the elimination of gasoline powered cars and the dependence on “renewable sources” of energy and the resulting brown-outs and black-outs this causes, it seems to me that California is ripe to be the first bright-blue state to wake from their woke fever dream and admit defeat.  Now maybe I’m off base and the trillions of dollars of revenue that Silicon Valley currently pumps into the California state coffers is enough to fend off reality for Sacramento law makers forever.

But even if insolvency isn’t on the immediate horizon, how about the common people.  You know, even if I were a Mexican-American working as a teacher or some other stalwart dues-paying client of the Democrat party I think I might be tired of having to put my kids in the bathtub to protect them from gangland gunfire in the crime riddled hellscape that their neighborhoods have become.  And that goes for having to pay five bucks a gallon for gas and $1,000 a month for an apartment that’s ten square feet!

But maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe this can go on forever.  Of course, if the profits in Silicon Valley ever dip it might really cause a problem.  Or suppose more of these companies decide to head to a low tax state like Florida or Nevada?  Well, that could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  The question I have is what happens then?  Can even Washington’s infinite currency printing machines make California work without Google and Apple?  They might be finding out sooner than they think.