California has been the jewel in the crown of the United States for over a hundred years.\u00a0 Throughout the Great Depression Dust Bowl Okies travelled across country looking for salvation in the Golden State.\u00a0 And afterwards throughout the second half of the twentieth century California was the capitol of modernity, innovation, affluence and optimism.\u00a0 It grew at an astonishing pace both in wealth and in population for what seemed like forever.\u00a0 And it reaped the rewards of this growth when Silicon Valley become the engine that powered not only California\u2019s economy but the whole country through stock ownership in companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft.<\/p>\n
But in the last decade that has all changed.\u00a0 California\u2019s policies on almost every aspect of life in the Golden State have conspired to put an end to that growth.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For that reason alone, the exodus of Californians to red states like Tennessee and Texas has been large.\u00a0 So much so that for the first time ever the state has lost representation in Congress.<\/p>\n
But that is just the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0 Even the enclaves of the absurdly rich around Los Angeles and San Francisco are beginning to suffer from violent crime to an extent they\u2019ve never experienced before.\u00a0 And the lower income areas are becoming no-go zones for vulnerable older people and women.\u00a0 The effect of all this is to begin unravelling the fabric of normal life in the state.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 District attorneys and prosecutors refuse to prosecute property crime and even some violent offenders.\u00a0 And so, the police have essentially stopped arresting them.<\/p>\n
Encampments of homeless drug addicts and illegal aliens have mushroomed across the cities and with them has come crime, violence, filth and disease.\u00a0 Taken along with all of the other dysfunctional policies of the state like the elimination of gasoline powered cars and the dependence on \u201crenewable sources\u201d 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.\u00a0 Now maybe I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n