by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n California in the Balance<\/strong><\/p>\n We calibrate California\u2019s decline by its myriad of paradoxes. The nation\u2019s highest bundle of gas, sales, and income taxes cannot close the nation\u2019s largest annual deficit at $25 billion. Test scores are at the country\u2019s near bottom; teachers\u2019 salaries at the very top. Scores of the affluent are leaving each week; scores of the indigent are arriving. The nation\u2019s most richly endowed state is also the most regulated; the most liberal of our residents are also the most ready to practice apartheid in their Bel Air or Palo Alto enclaves.<\/p>\n We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing \u2014 no warnings, no margins of error \u2014 desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them. I could go on. But you get the picture that we are living on the fumes of a rich state that our forefathers brilliantly exploited, and now there is not much energy left in the fading exhaust to keep us going.<\/p>\n I see California in terms now of the razor\u2019s edge with disaster not far in either direction. A postmodern affluent lifestyle hangs in the balance here without a margin of error. Let me give some examples.<\/p>\n I drive a lot on the\u00a099 Freeway<\/a>\u00a0[1] both northward and southward. (What follows would apply to the 101 as well, or, in fact, to most state \u201cfreeways.\u201d) In vast stretches of the 99 it is unchanged from the two lanes when I first began driving in 1969, but now with worse pavement, larger potholes, and treacherous shoulders. Yet the state then had about 20, not 37 million people, and around 12 million licensed drivers, not well over 25 million (and who knows how many unlicensed drivers?). Nonetheless, our ancestors were brilliant sorts, and left us a well-engineered and planned grid that can still handle all sorts of the minor challenges. So on a day of perfect weather, with good drivers, at low traffic hours between 9 and 2, and without ongoing road maintenance or construction, I can make the 190 miles to either Sacramento or Los Angeles in three hours \u2014 just as I used to in far older, less reliable cars of thirty years past.<\/p>\n But that is rare these days. You see, there are too many proverbial ifs now. Tamper with just one variable \u2014 leave too early or return too late; have some rain or fog; have one of the two lanes shut down for anything from tree trimming to pothole filling; experience one idiot whose lawn-mower or paint sprayer fell out of his open flatbed truck \u2014 and the fragile system shuts completely down, creating paralysis for thousands of backed-up drivers. For our generation\u2019s grid to work as it should, we would need three lanes, in good condition, perhaps four \u2014 and a pool of drivers who were all trained, licensed, registered, and insured. But you see, we had other priorities and values the last twenty years and so we took for granted the freeways we inherited. So we indulged and as the proverbially obese clogged our arteries.<\/p>\n Consider also regulation. In a vast state of 20 million in 1970 few cared that there were new building code rules and mounting new labor statutes. All sorts of innovative bureaucracies\u00a0came on line<\/a>\u00a0[2]. I remember the mosquito abatement jeeps spraying pools suddenly everywhere to stop mosquito-born disease; the country dog people were out in force checking for licenses and shots on your farm to eradicate even the rumor of rabies. Now fast forward to 37 million residents, with a vast new government superstructure and we have become both the most and the least regulated. The poor broke highway patrolman sits on the corner, straining his neck to find a cell-phone user who is a sure thing for a $200 hit. Yet he would hardly wish to drive two miles away along a rural pond where a dishwasher is tossed in open daylight \u2014 the former involves money and the law-abiding, the latter nothing but all sorts of unimaginable costs and trouble. So the message for the Californian is to toss the refrigerator out in the pond, but don\u2019t dare use that cell phone while waiting for the green light. I rode my bike (idiocy, of course, being defined by doing the same thing as led to catastrophe a month ago) by a cluster of trailers and shacks the other day and quickly surmised that it would take about 10 bureaucratic divisions \u2014 EPA, building permit regulators, law enforcement, child protective services, health department, animal control, hazardous waste \u2014 to deal with the pathologies apparent to the passing naked eye, and so understood that we must grant the new homesteaders\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0freedom by virtue of their lawlessness, and as compensation try to make more unfree the lawful, whose transgressions are rare as they are lucrative.<\/p>\n Water is the same. Give California two wet, snow-filled years, as we have had between 2010-2011, and we look like Ireland. This year the gleeful environmentalists will watch the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers run unimpeded from the Sierra, in all their 19th-century glory. The 1920s-era reservoirs are full; the 1960s canals brimming with water. Those who damn Henry Huntington\u2019s wondrous 1912 Big Creek Hydroelectric Project as ecologically hurtful will be out in force sailing all summer on his beautiful manmade eponymous 1912 lake. Even the cut-off West Side farmers may get a sort of irrigation reprieve: there is too much rather than too little water this year, as even the park benches at the lower rivers\u2019 edges are now underwater.<\/p>\n