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Nov. 11, 2023 - Epoch Times
55:19
Why Is California's Cost of Living So High and Will It Come Down? | Victor Davis Hanson
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This was the most naturally wealthiest state.
When I was growing up, it was very inexpensive.
And we had everybody flock to California because land was cheap.
There was a carefree attitude.
They inherited the most naturally rich state.
Soil, oil, minerals, timber, weather, climate.
And what did they do with that inheritance?
They squandered it.
And they pursued unicorns of, let's go completely, let's outlaw natural gas stoves.
Let's build high-speed rail.
It'll only cost 10 billion.
It's up to 15 billion.
We haven't laid one foot of track for 15 years of construction.
And right now, that's slated somewhere between 200 and 300 billion.
My guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, scholar and historian with Hoover Institute.
Today he'll talk about why the cost of living is so high in California and it's going higher and what Californians can do to reverse this trend.
We have the largest number of billionaires in the United States.
We have the wealthiest zip codes.
We also have the highest number of people on public assistance.
One out of every three lives in California.
So there are millions of left.
And those are the brightest and the best and the smartest and the most capable and the most angry.
Most important.
I'm Siamakorami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Victor, it's great to have you on, back on.
Welcome back.
Thank you for having me.
We want to talk to you about something that is in the mind of everybody in California.
Yes.
It's the cost of living.
Yes.
It's kind of getting a little bit outrageous, you know, and the cost of living here is almost 40% more than the national average.
We want to get into the factors on why.
Why?
Why?
It's a multifaceted answer, but the most obvious is that from Berkeley to La Jolla, there is an elite of 10 to 20 million people, and they are not subject to market realities.
They either inherited their homes or they're part of the tech boom, the $9 trillion in market capitalization.
Or they're in global trade or whatever.
They're some of the wealthiest people in the world.
So 10 to 20 million you mentioned?
I would say about 15 million people, if you look at their per capita income, they're the wealthiest of all Americans.
The zip codes on those places are the wealthiest in the country.
And...
They dominate the political regime in California, and the nexus has changed from 50 years ago from Los Angeles, and that was built on real estate, oil, development, manufacturing, defense, and that's pretty much gone.
And now it's high-tech Silicon Valley.
And that type of wealth is very different.
And it's spin-offs in law, insurance, etc.
Hedge funds, finance.
The service providers and all that.
Yes.
And they are more utopian because they're not earthy.
They're not farming.
They're not mining.
They're not building.
And they began 30 to 40 years ago on a highly regulatory agenda.
And that meant you could not build in particular places.
The Coastal Commission wouldn't even let you remodel a home without their permission.
And suddenly we had 90, 100 boards of regulation all through California.
And there was strict zoning laws.
So if you look at the state, there are areas in the state that are almost open.
I mean, they could be easily developed.
But the entrenched wealthy people do not want that to happen.
It's almost the Like the metaphor of the person who goes up in the attic and closes the trap door behind them.
They have theirs.
And so if you go, just to take one example, in 280 from Pau Alto to South San Francisco, west to the Pacific Ocean, there's thousands of acres.
They're just sitting there.
They're beautiful.
They have California aqueduct water and Crystal Springs Reservoir.
They've got a multi-lane freeway.
They have mass transit nearby, but they won't let anybody build there.
And that means that the price per square foot of housing in general in California, but specifically within 50 miles of the The Pacific Ocean is really unattainable for most others.
They either have to inherit the land or the house, and that's what's happened.
That's the biggest problem.
The other problem is it's a uniparty state.
There are no Republican statewide officeholders, no Attorney General, no Secretary of State, no Lieutenant General, nothing.
There are no Majorities in the legislature.
In fact, the Democrats have a supermajority in the state Senate and in the Assembly, and they have the governorship.
So that means that any person who has an idea, such as, I'm going to have Drag show performances in a school, or I suggest that you can have this type of literature in a library, or I'm going to raise the gasoline tax so it's highest so people can't afford to drive, and that'll force them into high-speed rail.
Or we're going to build a high-speed rail.
There's no opposition to it.
Because the Republican Party is neutered.
And that's a result of the people with the tech boom, they have the money.
No longer do the conservatives have the money.
And then we've had a massive flight from California.
Over the last 30 years, anywhere from 8 to 10 million people.
And this was the constituency that voted for Ronald Reagan, George Dick Mason, Pete Wilson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, which was 32 years of Republican governance, but that's gone.
We've had eight years of Jerry Brown, and we're going to have eight years of Gavin Newsom, and we'll never have a Republican again, unless people change their mind.
And then we were the largest recipient of immigration in the United States.
Twenty-seven percent of the people who live in California were not born in the United States, and many of them came illegally.
So we had half of the undocumented workers, undocumented aliens.
And many of them came impoverished, and they needed massive infusions of health, education, housing, food, legal help.
And so they looked toward the Democratic Party for this lavish entitlement industry.
You put all of that together of the Reagan voters leaving, new, needier poor people coming, and massive wealth being established, and you sort of had a medieval society where the middle class fled, the poor are subsidized, and the very wealthy are not subject to...
They don't really care about the effects of the measures they enact.
So we have the highest gasoline tax in the country now.
And we have the highest price of gasoline because of our formulas that we mandate.
And yet, still at this date, we have fourth highest reserves of oil in the United States, not fully utilized.
We probably have one of the largest natural gas reservoirs that could be tapped.
We don't do that.
We still have the largest agricultural sector And that's shrinking because of regulation and water restrictions.
We at one time had, I think, the fourth largest timber industry.
We regulated that out of business.
And we had large mining industries.
So this was the most naturally wealthiest state.
When I was growing up, it was very inexpensive.
So we had the Oklahoma diaspora.
A million people came here from Oklahoma during the 30s and 40s.
And we had everybody flock to California because land was cheap.
There was a carefree attitude.
There was a dynamic political debate back and forth.
We had a viable Republican Party.
And it was kind of a live and let live attitude.
And now we're sort of a nanny state, ossified, calcified.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
Now, you mentioned the people that are living in the coast, so this is this population, 20 million you mentioned.
To them, so what you're saying is to them the cost of living here is okay?
They understand it's high, but the way a large percentage of them inherited their home, that's the biggest cost.
So you're talking If you want to get a 2,000 square foot home in Palo Alto or, I don't know, La Jolla or you want it in Monterey or Carmel, talking three to four million dollars, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars a square foot, that home in Fresno or Sacramento or Bakersfield is a third that cost.
But a third of that cost is still twice what it is everywhere else.
And so that group has the wherewithal or the inheritance for their homes, and then salaries are very high in what they're engaged in.
And they're engaged in tech, law, insurance, finance.
We have the largest number of billionaires in the United States.
We have the wealthiest zip codes.
We also have the highest number of people on public assistance in the United States.
One out of every three lives in California.
We're pretty much right where Appalachia is, the number of people who are below the poverty level.
21% of the state is below the poverty level.
And so you can see that we have the richest and the poorest, and it's all of one party.
So there is no middle class and there is no Republican Party to speak of.
And so the wealthy keep...
Making it more difficult to be an entrepreneur, a small business person, a middle class person, whether it's housing regulations or employment regulations or business regulations.
And then the poor are subsidized.
And so...
It is very medieval.
We should remember we have the highest income taxes, 13.3 is the top rate, but it kicks into about 10% when you get to 60,000.
We have among the highest sales taxes, depending on the county, very high, 10 to 12%.
And then...
As I said, we have the highest gasoline taxes.
We have, except for Hawaii, we have the highest price of gas and we have the highest kilowatt price, deliberately so.
So we are doing massive subsidies for wind and solar, even though we know they're terribly inefficient compared to natural gas, which is clean burning and hydro and nuclear.
To give you some example, we passed a water bond To provide seven billion dollars for new reservoirs and water conservation.
We never built one of the reservoirs.
We are blowing up four as we speak on the Klamath River and those four reservoirs provided Recreation, flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric for 80,000 families.
We're blowing them up.
We were going to shut down.
We've shut down every nuclear plant except one, Diablo Cannon.
Gavin Newsom said he was going to shut it down, and then people looked at the solar wind alternative, and they said, we can't supply the needs of California.
Every business will leave.
So that is temporarily open, but they want to shut it down, and they will.
And so this was self-created.
They inherited two things, this generation that's in power.
They inherited the most naturally rich state in the Union as far as any barometer of soil, oil, minerals, timber, weather, climate.
And they inherited the richest man-made inheritance.
They inherited sophisticated bridges, sophisticated freeways, sophisticated airports.
They invented the clover leaf in California.
And they inherited a tri-part university system, J.C. 100 Community College, 23 state colleges.
Twelve UC camp.
And what did they do with that inheritance?
They squandered it.
They both did not maintain it.
They did not reinvest, but they took that inheritance and that wealth and they pursued unicorns of, let's go completely, let's outlaw natural gas stoves.
Let's build high-speed rail.
It'll only cost $10 billion.
It's up to $15 billion and we haven't laid one foot of track.
For 15 years of construction.
And that's slated somewhere between 200 and 300 billion.
And right now they're promising us in 10 years you can ride from Merced, California to Bakersfield in today's dollars for $83 at about A third faster than you can on Amtrak.
And there's nobody who wants to go from Bakersfield to Merced.
That's what utopianism is.
So you're saying this is mostly policy-related?
From what you're saying, this is mostly policy-related?
It's demographics.
We kind of made it.
Yes.
The demography of people, massive flight, because people said, I am not going to pay...
All these monies and taxes, and then get substandard schools, expensive power, expensive gas, and I'm leaving when I can go to tax-free Nevada across the border, tax-free Florida, tax-free Texas, where the schools are better, the infrastructure's better.
So they left, and they're leaving as we speak.
And then people from south of the border said, well, you may be leaving But compared to Oaxaca, Mexico, this is paradise, and I'm coming.
And people from Asia as well.
And we had an unlimited, you know...
Compared to any country, this is paradise.
Yes.
I mean, everybody knows that if you're in a multiracial society, you have to have one culture, and you have to have immigration that's meritocratic, measured, legal, and diverse.
And we did just the opposite.
It's not diverse, it's not meritocratic, it's not legal.
And we brought millions of people in that had enormous needs.
And then we the host lost all confidence in assimilating and integrating.
We ditched the melting pot and adopted the salad bowl that your outward appearance or your race or your religion were essential, not incidental to who you were.
We allowed that to happen.
So that was a big problem, and the politics followed that.
The politics and the money, and then all of a sudden, somewhere between 1995 and 2005, globalization really hit, and we found people that were very brilliant in Silicon Valley, and they realized that they woke up one morning and their computer did not have 250 million consumers that had 6 billion.
And the money from all over the world poured into Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everything, right into a very small area.
And that area then dominated by funding the politics.
And it was dominated...
The politics were very wealthy people said...
I have the nicest house, I have the nicest private jet, I have everything I need, but I want to live forever and I'm worried about climate change and I'm worried about this and this and this.
And they had all of these grandiose utopian schemes and then they inflicted them on the rest of the people who didn't have those resources.
So they basically said, When you turn on the lights, you're going to pay more for electricity because we don't want to generate electricity because it fouls my air.
When you drive, you're going to pay double the price of gas because I don't worry about my jet fuel.
But it's bad for climate change.
And when you buy a house, there's no reason why you people need anything like 3,000.
We want you in high-rises with mass transit.
Everything that I do, I don't want you to have, is the attitude of the California elite.
So these elites, they made a lot of money from the tech space, and then they had the power over the other industries, and then they're funding politicians, and they're kind of telling politicians what to do through their funds.
Yes, and they...
So, I was born in California in 1953, and the nexus of political power was Los Angeles, because that had the biggest population.
Somewhere around the late 90s, because of what I discussed, this $9 trillion corridor from San Jose to San Francisco, and Stanford University and Berkeley, the twin top universities, were training this elite.
They're very left-wing institutions.
And they had the money.
The money's all in left-wing.
Look at the Fortune 400.
You have to be a multi-billionaire now to get on it, but if you look at the names on it, they're left-wing for the most part.
And they're not in earthy, muscular pursuits or professions or industries.
It's not manufacturing.
It's not assembly that makes you a lot of money.
It's hedge funds and investment and foreign financial deals and law and Tech.
And so that money then fueled the Bay Area.
And suddenly, all the politicians of note that ran the state came out of that milieu of a triangle.
It was pretty much Stanford, Silicon Valley, San Francisco.
And they each played an integral role.
Silicon Valley provided the wherewithal, the money.
San Francisco provide the old family names or the old pros, and Stanford provide the left-wing ideology and Berkeley.
And the result was that suddenly, in the past, the California senator did not run things.
Reagan was an exception as a governor.
But suddenly, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, Camilla Harris, Gavin Newsom, they were the most powerful people in the United States because they had the most money and they were in the biggest state.
And the San Francisco embryo was what birthed all of politics in California.
Very left-wing, very, I mean, they talked about diversity, but at one time, you could make the argument that the most undiverse people in the world, Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, Dianne Feinstein as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence or Judiciary Committee, Barbara Boxer with seniority, they all lived right next to each other, and they were.
They were old families that were white and very, very wealthy.
And they were lecturing everybody else about diversity.
And you have to be regulated and you have to do this and you have to do that.
And they were never...
They had beautiful homes at Tahoe or down Palm Springs area.
They had big homes in San Francisco.
And it was a very strange mentality that was superimposed on this state.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
So most of these people that are living in these areas, you mentioned the coastal areas, that are wealthy, that they do care about the poor people, you know, the poverty.
That's what they say always.
In theory.
In the abstract.
But they rarely venture to Fresno County, Kings County, Tulare County, Kern County.
They don't even know where they are.
They don't go up to the north of Napa.
They have a lot of people from Salinas or Gilroy that commute into the Bay Area and work.
If you go to Stanford University on any given day on El Camino Real, you'll see bus after bus after bus after bus.
And the streets are lined with campers, Winnebago's, buses, and poor people are driving in from Gilroy or Watsonville, Hollister, and they rent a bed in these campers and then they go to work for Google or they do landscaping or maintenance or cleaning or cooking.
So yes, They're worried about those people in the abstract, but they don't put their children in the public schools with those people.
They don't socialize with those people.
And out of that, I guess you'd call it Humane segregation.
They feel terrible about it.
So in the abstract, they try to compensate at the expense of someone else.
Let all the people come in.
Let's give them all this money.
But you and the middle class are going to pay for it, and your schools will be impacted, and your areas will be ridden with crime if you don't assimilate and integrate people.
So it's kind of a virtue.
It's a psychological mechanism in general with the left, the very wealthy left, that It's almost a window into their soul that they do not want to be with the muscular classes.
They do not want to be with poor people.
They do not want to be with people who don't look like them.
And I say that they don't want to, not on what they say, but...
Where they live, where their children go to school, where and with whom they socialize, and to the extent they know the quote other, what the other does.
Are they colleagues?
No, they're usually service workers for them.
And they feel terrible about it.
They feel so terrible about it, they want to vote in vast entitlement programs.
So half of all births in California are on Medi-Cal.
And when you look at the California budget now versus 40 years ago, and you look at infrastructure, And investment, highways, bridges, dams, versus Medi-Cal, welfare supports.
It's just, it's flipped.
So we're not building the state.
The state's infrastructure is designed for 20 million people circa 1975, not 41 million.
That's why we have a lot of traffic and other...
And the only nice thing about it is you've noticed lately that Gavin Newsom has grandiose ambitions as governor, national ambitions.
So suddenly the last year, I don't know if you've noticed that every road is under construction.
There's people picking up trash on the side of the street.
He's worried about train robbing down at the port of L.A. He's talking about we need to have...
More energy, and so he's starting to sound a little bit like the old Democrats we had, Pat Brown, Jerry's dad, but that will pass when his ambitions are satiated, I think.
And now, you mentioned that the idea is to increase the cost of gas for people not to drive.
Can you explain this more?
That was said explicitly by a Californian, Stephen Chu, who was the energy czar, Secretary of Energy, as you remember, for Barack Obama.
And when Obama was running in 2008, he let the proverbial cat out of the bag when he said that he was going to shut down coal and electricity was going to soar, and that would be good.
It wouldn't bother him or the other people, but it would make the need, it would be so expensive we would use less.
So that was the theory.
But Stephen Chu...
He had a GAF, which is the GAF is defined in Washington as an accidental declaration of the truth.
And he said, we need to get gasoline prices up to European.
At that time, they were about $9 a gallon.
And it was about $2.40 here.
Gas is a lot cheaper here than a lot of other countries across the globe.
Yes, because they're socialists and they don't have the natural resources that we do.
We were, until 2021, the largest natural gas and oil producer in the world.
And we were slated to be that way for the next 10, 15 years.
And then we shut down the Keystone Pipeline.
We shut down ANWR. We stopped new federal leasing.
We started hectoring frackers.
We discouraged bank lending, etc., etc.
We started subsidizing wind and solar.
Nevertheless, the idea is that if you decide certain industries or purchases or commodities or consumerism don't fit with your agenda of man-made global warming or land use or indiscriminate and unwise consumer spending,
then this sort of I don't know what you'd call it, Borg or Blob, this collective consciousness on the coast says, why are people buying double cab trucks?
Why do they need jet skis?
Why do they need a Winnebago?
Why do they need to get in the car and drive to the mountains?
It makes so much more sense that they live in high-rises.
They don't need to barbecue out in their backyard.
They need to get high density, and then they will be served by high-speed rail, which is much more economical.
We will raise the price of gasoline and diesel fuel and electricity to such levels that air conditioning is not good for the environment.
They can use swamp coolers.
It's much more natural.
They don't need lawns, so we don't want to pay for water to be transferred long distances except for us.
And that was the attitude to discourage what they called unwise consumerism by deliberately rigging or regulating the economy and instilling man-made shortages so that prices would go up and then people would drive less or they would consume less of what was supposedly not wise.
And that's what they're outlawing gasoline engines by 2035, I suppose.
Nobody knows how you can drive across California in an electric vehicle.
They're subsidizing.
They're going to try to outlaw natural gas stoves, which are very efficient and clean burning.
They want you to use electricity, but they've insured by...
Not building any more hydroelectric or indeed destroying them or not building nuclear that the price per kilowatt is sky high.
But they don't care because you will turn on your lights less.
So you'll have less heat being generated by appurtences that use electricity, supposedly.
And then when you look at the people who are doing this, where Nancy Pelosi lives, her Napa estate, her San Francisco estate, the Dianne Feinstein Tahoe estate, the Barbara Boxer Palm Springs area estate, the Gavin Newsom multiple estates.
You can see where that mentality arises from.
Or you look at how Mark Zuckerberg lives, or the Google founders, or all of them.
Their lifestyles are so distant from their advocacies.
There's a connection, but it's not that they live the talk.
The attitude is, I am enjoying my Gulfstream IV or my Citation X and my Woodside estate, and I understand I gulp a lot of power, but I need to do that, as John Kerry says, because it's more efficient for me to be an advocate of green power or diversity and equity.
But as long as they don't affect me.
I think people are starting to catch on to this elite, woke, green, whatever we want to call it, this multifaceted agenda that doesn't have popular support.
So if we look at the United States now, the energy question, the crime question, the border question, the foreign policy question, the consumer regulatory question, the people are not on the side of this agenda.
Victor, the cost of living is going at a level where a lot of, you're mentioning 20 million people, 15, 20 million people across the coast in California, which are wealthy, and they're wealthier than anywhere in the people around the world, but there is a category of them that are getting hit.
Because even $250,000, $300,000 a year in California after tax, and then you have all these bills, and electricity bills are going up, and then gas.
And the housing cost.
Yes.
Is there a point where, are they in a position where they're starting to see the cost of living?
Slowly, and maybe for two or three reasons.
One, as you say, if you make $250,000 and you're paying $30,000, $30,000 to $40,000 in income tax plus 39% federal tax, and you cannot write the state income tax off anymore.
So it used to be if California's income tax was 13%, it was only 7% if you were in that tax.
Now it's the whole 13%.
And property tax is supposedly limited to 1%, but it's not.
There's add-ons in various counties, and the assessments are so high that the property taxes are more expensive than 2% anywhere else.
So when they look at all of this, that professional class, the professors, the lawyers, the doctors, the mid-level corporate people, The people that have a job that's paying a high salary, but they're not really the big business owners.
Say your average young couple is 40, and they have two children, and they want to buy a nice home in Monterey or Carmel.
And they look at it, and they see 1,500 square feet, a 1950s home, and it's $2.5 million.
And as soon as they buy that, they think, oh my gosh, I'm going to have to pay Twenty, thirty thousand, forty thousand a year in property taxes and then I'll have to put solar panels on because it's the electrics and I'm going to have to commute with the gas prices and labor is so high if I remodel it and they can't do it.
So they have two choices.
They either go out of state And our federal system is a wonderful system, but in the terms of California, it works as a safety valve, unfortunately.
So we don't have political change because these frustrated people prefer, rather than to fight here, to go to Texas or Wyoming or Montana or Utah or Tennessee.
So millions have left.
And those are the brightest and the best and the smartest and the most capable and the most angry, most important.
The other thing that's happening, as I said, after 50 years of immigration from Mexico, we have a solid middle class of Mexican-Americans, but also what we call Hispanics.
And they tend to gravitate to small businesses and public employment.
The public employment group are pretty left-wing because they're very high-paid, and many of them still live in places like Bakersfield or Stockton, where it's somewhat of a fort.
But the entrepreneurial class understands that the only way you can survive is Cash sales, be paid in cash, the black market.
They're constantly getting a second job, a third job, and they're tired of it.
And so, if you're going to have political change, if you look at the demographics, people who answer, I mean, we're a multiracial society, but the people who say that they identify with a particular group, there is no majority.
It's about 44% white, 45% white.
Latino and maybe 10 to 15 percent Asian.
The black population is down to 2 to 3 percent.
And that group of people feels that they want to be obviously upwardly mobile.
You can't do it.
And they're no longer the subsidized poor who just came from Mexico or Vietnam and they want federal largesse and state largesse.
Now they have to pay for that.
They are the taxpayers.
And I mean that literally.
I know so many people who say to me, I grew up in welfare.
It was great.
We had the best welfare system in the world.
We had everything.
And now I have to pay for it.
And these guys are not working.
Or why are we letting these people in?
This doesn't work.
Or why are these guys on the coast?
Why are they making all those rules that I can't do it?
I can't function.
And so that's a potential source of political change, that new constituency.
If the conservative traditional Republican, what's left of it, the vestigial Republicans, can be reborn and appeal to that group, sort of a populist party rather than a golf course elite.
Now, where is all this headed based on what you see?
Where is California headed with the situation we have?
It's at a fork in the road.
If there is not a grassroots revolt against these elites, then what you're going to see is an intensification of what we have now.
More and more people who are the entrepreneurial class are going to leave.
And the professional classes are going to leave.
Yeah, they're going to leave because they cannot function here.
Another thing that's going on in California, we don't talk about it, is the most radical repertory admissions and hiring and admissions to college.
And repertory, I mean they feel that no longer does proportional representation work for their agendas.
So if you're a Stanford University, you brag that you're only going to let in 20% white students, not the national average of 67, because it is a national university.
And you're going to let in Latinos and blacks at higher than their demographics.
And we're not going to have any SAT requirements anymore.
And they dropped it.
So did the state system.
So we're going to stress diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The problem with that is that they themselves set the rules years ago of what they're now destroying.
And there was a reason why they set them.
Because Californians said, we are going to be the most meritocratic.
We're not going to have the old boy East Coast.
We're going to be purely meritocratic.
And the people that have the highest SAT and the highest grades and the hardest working, which were, to be frank, of the immigrant groups were Asians.
They're going to be rewarded.
And we don't really care if they're 30 or 40%.
And it was a competitiveness.
So if you were a fifth generation, you said, I have to study hard because these immigrants are coming and working.
And there was a robustness.
But when you destroy that in the university system, and they have, then what's happening is when you talk to California faculty off the record, they say things like, We are letting in students that cannot do the work because they were not adequately prepared in K-12 for the teachers' union and other reasons.
So I have a decision.
I either have to water down the curriculum, inflate the grades, or be targeted as a systemic racist for grading harshly on people of a particular demographic.
And they'll usually tell you something to the effect, I'm not going to die on the altar of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which means if you look at the curriculum and the grading, it's not amerocratic.
And that's fairly new, but it's starting to infiltrate the law schools.
You can see what Stanford Law School's become, the medical schools, the engineering schools.
And you're starting to see people in Silicon Valley say to you, If I have to hire a coder with an MA, I would rather hire someone from Texas A&M or Georgia Tech than Stanford or Berkeley, because I know that they're still merit-craftian.
Wow.
And that's what's very dangerous.
So what I'm getting at is, either we change and we go back to the earlier California model.
A quality of opportunity, racially blind, ethnically blind quality of opportunity, and reinvigorate the state, or we continue down this controlled commissariat, sort of Soviet system, and we're going to have massive flight, and we're going to have a breakdown of our institutions.
I think we're there.
I have been driving to Stanford University since I was a student.
So in a state that only had 21 million but wonderful infrastructure, I could go from my home to Stanford University in three hours.
Two hours and 45 minutes.
For me to replicate that today was supposedly we'd have 40 years or 50 years of infrastructure improvements.
I have to time my travel to about 4 in the morning or after 10 at night.
If I try it in the traditional hours, it can take me anywhere from 4 to 5 hours.
Due to traffic jams, accidents, road construction.
And when I look at the airports like LAX or I look at the universities, the whole system is starting to...
It's too regulated.
It's not bureaucratic.
And we have...
Legal immigration is a wonderful thing.
I'm a big supporter of it.
But if you say that the state's going to have...
Almost one out of every three people was not born in the United States.
Then you have an enormous responsibility to acculturate them and say, look, this is how the system works.
We're going to teach you civics, the American tradition, and you're going to invigorate all of us, but you have to understand that your native culture is on the periphery.
You enrich us with food, fashion, music, art, but not the core.
You don't tamper with constitutional government or equality of women or free speech.
And that's not happening.
And so we have a lot of people who have come from different countries, but they're not part of the body politic.
They're segregated in their own communities.
They don't understand the basics about...
I'll give you an example.
Come to the United States and then when your appliance burns out or your car seat is old, if it doesn't fit in your garbage can, you pay $25 and take it to the dump.
You don't go out to a person's vineyard or orchard, look around like that and throw it out.
That's what I spend one hour every Sunday morning.
I go through my orchard and I just walk through it and I pick up trash.
And when I see the people throwing the trash, I try to tell them and they either threaten you or they drive off.
And if you call the authorities, they say, it's out of control.
And we could do this conversation with a homeless problem.
We could do it with all these problems.
And so the therapeutic California mindset does not work.
If you invite people or you allow people to do things and there's no consequences, whether it's smash and grab in San Francisco or carjacking or shoplifting or illegal immigration and immigrants coming in and throwing things along the side of the road, Or people injecting fentanyl and heroin on the streets.
And there's no consequences because the people who made these laws think they're protected from the consequences.
Then it falls on the middle class and then they leave.
And then we're stuck with a medieval society.
And so that's the dark, pessimistic scenario, unless we have radical political change.
So what do you recommend to the Californians?
Because a lot of them, no matter what bucket they're in, they're starting to see some things, and we've been covering a lot of things on the show.
I would say this to them.
The Democratic Party that you were loyal to, and I was brought up in a Democratic household, and my siblings are all Democrats.
It's not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman or JFK or Pat Brown Sr.
It is a radical, progressive, Jacobin party.
And it does not believe in equality of opportunity, it believes in equality of result.
It does not believe in freedom, but in state control.
And it has so controlled and regulated and dictated these schemes that it's going to destroy you.
You're sort of the proverbial Dr.
Frankenstein who created this creature, and that Frankensteinian monster is going to destroy you because you can't control it.
You can see it on the campuses when everybody thought...
I'm a third-generation Californian.
My child goes to Stanford or Berkeley or UCLA, but I believe in diversity, equity, inclusion, open borders, etc.
And then we have people chanting, you know, from the river to the sea or destroy Israel right on campus.
Or at Stanford University, we have a federal judge speaking, and all of a sudden people say, I'd like to rape your daughters if you don't shut up.
And there's no consequences.
And that's what's happened to the campuses.
So these people, I think, that we're talking about, this professional class, upper middle class, wants to vote against this, but they're so ingrained with dislike of the old Republican Party that they can't quite vote.
Admit that they would vote for anybody other than a left-wing Democrat, even though they understand that's destroying them.
I talk to them all the time.
I really do.
And they'll say things to me like, I can't go to San Francisco.
Last time I went, I saw two cars with the windows broken in.
I saw a homeless person come up and scream at me.
I stepped in human excrement on my shoes, Victor.
I don't drive there.
I have to take Uber.
Or they'll say my child had a 4.0, 4.5.
He had a perfect SAT score.
He did not get into Stanford.
Can you believe that?
What has happened?
He worked his whole life.
He didn't get into Berkeley.
He didn't get into UCLA. What is going on?
Or they'll say, I just filled up with gas.
It's $6.50 a gallon.
And then you say to them, and why is that?
Well, Donald Trump did it.
Or it's the MAGA agenda.
They still say that.
So they haven't come to the realization that their ideology is destroying themselves.
And I don't know, it will take a gifted conservative To create a party, a movement that can attract those people in California, maybe not nationwide, but in this particular state, it will require a very sophisticated Republican architecture.
And I have a feeling that The hope lies with the Mexican-American population, which is following the Italian model.
They're intermarrying, integrating, and assimilating.
But I think they will be the ones that finally say, we can't do this anymore.
I can't function as an electrician anymore.
My plumbing business does not work.
There's too many regulations, too high taxes.
I work all day and I'm sending my kids to college and all of a sudden I can't afford a house.
I'm making $200,000 in my window washing business and I can't afford a house.
And I think we're starting to see it, but it's going to be very difficult.
Is there a way for the current leaders that are running California State that have the power in the legislature and the governor?
Do you know any people who are not left-wing in California?
That's not a rhetorical question.
I mean, we have 53 congresspeople and there's 11 Republicans.
And as I said, we have no governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, state controller who's You don't think they will change their thinking?
Yeah, I think every once in a while I see a young assemblyman, assemblywoman from Orange County or from Fresno County, and they're new and they're fresh, and they get elected and they have great ideas, but they haven't been able to capture the legislature yet.
I mean, the way to look at, to finish, the way to look at this is that we got an enormous shock from, let's say, 1980 to 2000.
We had the greatest exodus of people from a particular state in our history, much greater than the so-called Okie migration.
From 1980 to 2000.
Yes.
And maybe on to 2010.
It was massive.
And we had massive illegal immigration.
And we had massive...
So that's when the middle class left.
Yes.
And we had massive creation of vast wealth that had never been seen in civilization, much less in such a small area of Silicon Valley.
And that meant that we suddenly came in and we imported a huge impoverished class that needed state subsidies.
And then the people who would be dynamic to provide them job left.
And then the people who were setting the policy were not subject to any of this because they were so wealthy.
And that it was very medieval.
It's very much like the medieval keep where the people have a manor and they live in the castle and then there's peasants outside that they subsidize and then they get fealty from them.
But the entrepreneur, the sword maker, the shoemaker No.
They're nothing.
And that's what California has become.
It's destroyed its middle class.
It's destroyed meritocracy.
I mean, it's not Victor Ranning.
San Francisco has the highest per capita property crime rate in the nation.
California, as I said, has the highest income tax.
California has the highest number of undocumented Immigrants.
It has the highest number of homelessness.
It has the highest number of people on public assistance.
It has the highest poverty level almost.
It's debatable how you adjudicate it.
But it also has the greatest concentration of wealth.
Do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
Well, I had two brothers and then two first cousins.
Their mother died and we grew up as a five group.
And I would call them, they're all educated and they're all left of center.
One moved to Portland.
One moved to the coast, San Luis Obispo.
One moved to Iowa.
And these are people who were fifth-generation Californians.
And I'm the only one that has land left, little 40 acres of the original 180.
And I have one sibling that still lives, but he wants to move.
And so that kind of sums it up.
If people who are left of center, and they are, Thank you.
Feel that the state doesn't have anything to offer them, or at least you can find an enclave within the state.
You can be shielded from the state, like San Luis Obispo.
And I get along with them.
I like them a great deal, my family.
But I think they have decided, as millions of others, that something went wrong and I'm going to leave for another place.
And they did.
If everybody leaves, then nothing changes.
So you can't just leave if you want to change California.
Somebody has to be here to acculturate new people who are coming and say, look, this was not what it used to be.
You can change it.
You can bring back.
You know, good roads, good universities, good infrastructure, very little crime, affordable housing, affordable energy, affordable fuel, and we can do that.
It's very easy to do.
You could do it in 10 years.
Victor Davis Hanson, scholar and historian, it was great to have you on California Insider.
Thank you for having me.
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