CA Leads the Way ... to Ruin

A blogger we often link to - Instapundit Glenn Reynolds - uses his USA Today column to review the new book of our favorite demographer Joel Kotkin. Here are some tasty bits:

Once a state where the middle class reigned supreme, the apotheosis of the American Dream, California now has the wealth distribution — and, in some disturbing ways, the political underpinnings — of a Third World country.

The (Silicon Valley) oligarchs feel free, and even entitled, to choose the direction of society in the name of a greater good, but somehow their policies seem mostly to make the oligarchs richer and more powerful.

The oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the "clerisy" class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses.

Because it doesn't have to work in competitive industries, the clerisy favors regulations, land-use rules and environmental restrictions that make things worse for businesses.

The lower classes, sustained by government handouts and by rhetoric from the clerisy, provide enough votes to keep the machine running, at least for a while.

As an emeritus member of the California "clerisy," I don't see much here to which I'd take exception. Growing up in CA, I remember being puzzled by accounts of East Coast parents frantically saving for children's college expenses. My baccalaureate degree cost my parents maybe $2000/year. Those days are long gone.