Apartheid Neighborhoods and CA Roulette

Power Line links to a Victor Davis Hanson article at RealClearPolitics. Historian Hanson continues to chronicle the ditzy decline of California, our latter-day Paradise Lost.

About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients reside in California. Approximately one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty line. More than a quarter of Californians were not born in the United States.

Many of the state's wealthiest residents support high taxes, no-growth green policies and subsidies for the poor. They do so because they reside in apartheid neighborhoods and have the material and political wherewithal to become exempt from the consequences of their own utopian bromides.

A few things keep California going. Its natural bounty, beauty and weather draw in people eager to play California roulette. The state is naturally rich in minerals, oil and natural gas, timber and farmland. The world pays dearly for whatever techies based in California's universities can dream up.

Less than 40 percent of California residents identify themselves as conservative. But red-county California represents some 75 percent of California's geographical area. It's as if large, rural Mississippi and tiny urban Massachusetts were one combined state -- all ruled by liberal Boston.

I spent most of my working life in "red-county California" and was actually represented by Republican Congressmen during most of that time. It wasn't quite Mississippi, but it was a very rural place where cotton and rice were local crops, along with the more famous fruits and nuts.