By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary
Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas —
and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I
wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that
there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in
newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars.
California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit
at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest unemployment
rate at 10.6 percent. It will soon vote whether to levy the nation’s highest
income and sales taxes, as if to encourage others to join the 2,000-plus high
earners who are leaving the state each week. The new taxes will be our way of
saying, “Good riddance.” And if California is home to one-third of the nation’s
welfare recipients and the largest number of illegal aliens, it is nonetheless
apparently happy and thus solidly for Obama, by a +24 percent margin in the
latest Field poll. The unemployment rate in my hometown is 16 percent, the per
capita income is $16,000 — and I haven’t seen a Romney sticker yet.
Shortly before taking office, Secretary Chu, remember,
quipped that he would like to see American gas prices rise to European levels —
presumably $9 or $10 a gallon — to discourage driving and thereby lower our
carbon footprint. If $50 for half a fill-up is any indication, California is
over halfway toward achieving Chu’s dream. If green bicycles are the ultimate
aim of our central-planning regulators, then they are making headway. I’ve
never seen so many new rural bike riders, though most of them out here in the
San Joaquin Valley have a bad habit of riding on the wrong side of the road.
A refinery fire, a power outage, a uniquely Californian
gasoline formula, years of regulating refineries into stasis — all that has
finally caught up with the state, as prices soar at the pump. Yet what
perplexes about California in extremis is the liberal ability for our state
government simply to ignore its own regulations, which it has been using to
paralyze businesses for years. For example, a panicked Governor Brown just
asked the state air-resources board to suspend the law that requires gas
stations to sell our special summer fuel formula through the month of October.
The state asserted that a one-time suspension would increase supplies and yet
not materially affect our air quality — which begs the question: Why, if that
is true, would such a regulation have been passed in the first place?
California has the nation’s highest gas taxes and fuel
prices, and the tightest supplies — and reputedly one of the worst-maintained
infrastructures, with out-of-date, overcrowded, and poorly maintained freeways.
When I head home each week from Palo Alto, I feel like an Odysseus fighting
modern-day Lotus Eaters, Cyclopes, and Laestrygonians to reach Ithaka,
wondering what obstacle will sidetrack me this trip — huge potholes, entire
sections of the freeway reduced to one lane, or various poorly marked detours?
If the nation’s highest gas taxes give us all that, what might the lowest
bring?
Although the state is facing a $16 billion annual
budgetary shortfall, Governor Brown is determined to press ahead with
high-speed rail — estimated to cost eventually over $200 billion. Such is his
zeal that he intends to override the environmental lawsuits that usually stymie
private projects for years. The line is scheduled to pass a few miles from my
farm, its first link connecting Fresno and Corcoran, home to the state prison
that houses Charles Manson.
Yet a money-losing Amtrak line already connects Fresno
and Corcoran. I often ride my bike near the tracks and notice the half-empty
cars that zoom by. Most farmers here are perplexed about why the state would
wish to borrow billions and destroy thousands of acres of prime farm land to
duplicate this little-traveled link. Support for high-speed rail is strongest in
the San Francisco Bay Area, but there is no support for beginning the project
where the noise and dirty reality might be too close to home for green
utopians.
California schools rate among the nation’s lowest in math
and English, but our shrinking numbers of teachers are among the country’s
highest paid. One-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California,
and 8 out of the last 11 million people added to the California population are
enrolled in Medicaid, but we are also the most generous state in sending
remittances to foreign countries — we contribute a third to a half of the
estimated $50 billion that leaves the U.S. each year for Mexico and elsewhere
in Latin America. It is puzzling in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley
to see both federal and state medical centers and nearby offices that
specialize in cash transfers to Mexico. But no one seems to see any disconnect
between the public need for free health care and the private desire to send
money to Mexico.
California has built the nation’s largest prison system,
but there is no room left in either state or county facilities for an
increasing number of dangerous felons. The same day last week that I emptied my
wallet for gas, my 15-hp ag irrigation pump simply quit during the night.
Nocturnal copper-wire thieves had come into the vineyard and yanked out the
electrical conduit. That’s the third theft of pump wire I’ve had this year —
and it costs $1,500 each time to repair the damage. I’m told that Mexican
national gangs go down to Los Angeles with their stolen copper to sell it to
mobile recyclers. No one calls the sheriff any more. Instead, we swap stories
about protective wire cages, spikes, cameras, lights, and booby traps. Barack
Obama once thundered, “Rich people are all for nonviolence. . . . They don’t want people taking their stuff.” I
plead guilty to his writ, at least for a while longer. But I don’t agree that
copper conduit is mere “stuff” or that stealing it counts as social protest or
that the thieves are necessarily poor.
The criminals have a sophisticated modus operandi, with
lookouts who drive around and report by cell phone when the coast is clear —
green-lighting comrade thieves who in a matter of minutes ride into the farm
alleyways on bicycles, cut and pull the wire, and pedal out with little noise
and no headlights. Two nights ago, when I returned to my farmhouse, an odd
couple was sitting in a car — each one on a cell phone — next to my mailbox.
They claimed they did not speak English, but after some harsh words they left —
surprised and angry that I had dared to ask them to leave my property.
It’s a veritable war these days in rural central
California — as copper-wire thieves, gangs, drug lords, and fencers run amuck
in a bankrupt state that can no longer afford to keep its felons incarcerated.
President Obama soars with talk of amnesty and the DREAM Act. But if we are
going to waive federal statutes for each illegal alien who we feel may some day
become a neurosurgeon or an experimental chemist, can’t we at least enforce the
law against those not in school and up to no good in the here and now, like the
two sitting in my driveway phoning directions for local thieves to yank out
copper wire?
Open borders, redistributionist socialism, therapeutic
and politicized public schools, and public-employee unions finally are proving
a match even for Apple, Google, Facebook, the Napa Valley wine industry,
Central Valley agribusiness, Hollywood, Cal Tech, Stanford, and Berkeley. In
California, it is a day-by-day war between what nature and past generations
have so generously bequeathed and what our bunch has so voraciously consumed.
On any given day, beautiful weather, the Pacific Coast,
and the majestic Sierra Nevada are trumped by released felons, $5-a-gallon gas,
and a 1970 infrastructure crumbling beneath a crowded 2012 state.
There are many lessons from California. One is that the
vision of the present administration is already here — and it simply does not
work.
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