PRESIDENTIAL RACE IS LAST BREATH FOR LIBERTY

 Gina Loudon gives America hard look at life in leftist-controlled state

I once asked a major journalist with the British Broadcasting Corporation why that news corporation has so many journalists in the U.S. His answer was simple and profound: The U.S. is so important in the world that anything it does affects everyone else.

So too, what happens in California is often prelude to what the nation might expect – from trends in fashion, to music, even business. Good and bad, if it starts in the Golden State, the wise investor gives it consideration. While the low-information voter gives little consideration to the presidential debates and has no clue who Justice Antonin Scalia was, the wise conservative considers the magnitude of what lies before us. California has given us a hint of what may be to come should Americans choose poorly in November. The picture should send fear through us all.

Consider leftist-controlled California, the most progressive and oppressive state in America. Progressive Democrats have a lock grip on Sacramento, including at times supermajorities in both chambers and currently every statewide office. They hatch their schemes from think-tanks on the campus of Berkeley and in offices in the Bay Area. The rest of us find ourselves questioning attacks on our liberty from major decisions like the Keystone XL pipeline to the seemingly trivial issues, like bans on plastic bags. Most of us have no idea that the same tiny cadre in the San Francisco Bay area is driving all of it. While our brothers in the Heartland and the South and occasionally other free states manage to turn back most of these insane ideas, almost every one of the craziest initiatives is law in California.Most of us on the right see Obama as a Marxist, a radical who seeks to spread wealth around and diminish the power of the United States in the world. Hillary and Bernie are promising to continue the same course, but where is that course leading us?

In just the past few years, California lawmakers indeed passed a ban on plastic bags. They also passed cap-and-trade, an insidious hidden tax that makes California gasoline the most expensive in the nation. They raised the income tax to the highest in the nation. They legalized pot, and made school boys and girls have to share locker-room showers with members of the opposite sex who claim gender confusion. They actually banned parents from being able to take those same confused children to counselors who would suggest they stay straight. While 24 states have banned the construction union giveaways called Project Labor Agreements, or PLAs, California lawmakers fully embrace them, going so far as to sanction taxpayers who dare to ban them locally. Californians often bemoan that one literally cannot make this stuff up.

With such an unimpeded ability to build the workers’ paradise, one would think California is nearing the utopia promised by the socialists teaching our children, the ones who think Sweden has it right. The gap between rich and poor in California should be the narrowest in the country.

However, by locking up fossil fuels from use, destroying dams, letting desperately needed water flow into the ocean and locking up land from development, average Californians enjoy a horribly depressed standard of living. San Diego, my town, is the worst city in the nation to accumulate wealth. If you have wealth, bought a home 20 or more years ago or inherited one, you have a shot. Instead of being the place where wealth is spread around, it is actually the place where wealth is extracted from the masses and delivered to those who lord over the land.

Joel Kotkin penned a poignant piece in the Orange County Register painting a picture of what the progressives actually created in California. The left has created a new feudalism that is 100 percent anathema to the American way, and completely opposite of the Founders’ vision for the Republic Ben Franklin promised us.

Feudalism was a system from the Dark Ages where princes and landed barons owned land and the peasant masses were relegated to working the land. Leftist California, where equality is the stated goal, is the state with the greatest divide between rich and poor. Additionally, Kotkin points out that California ranks third from the bottom, ahead of only New York and the District of Columbia, for the lowest homeownership rate, just 54 percent.

Kotkin describes California as becoming a graveyard for middle-class aspiration, citing a study of earning trajectories in Business Insider. California is the worst for shrinking middle-class earnings and the third-highest in proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 20 percent of residents.

In California, tech millionaires, affluent retired homeowners and public union members can do well. Cops and firefighters easily earn high six-figure salaries. The unionized longshoreman offloading your Prius from a cargo ship is probably banking $160,000. Construction unions drive up their pay so high that the private sector avoids them like the plague, so they push PLAs to force taxpayers to fund their greed. A plumber in San Francisco makes $100 per hour and earns overtime pay after the nation’s first 35-hour work week.

The best example of the feudalism couched as progressivism is the love of the electric vehicle. A wealthy Californian can buy a $70,000-$100,000 luxury electric vehicle and enjoy as much as $11,000 back in tax credits extracted from the working serfs. While those same serfs fund the highways with the nation’s highest gasoline tax scheme on the nation’s worst highways (thank you, construction unions for making construction to costly), the electric car owner uses the roads for free. Finally, while Joe Six Pack sits in the worst traffic congestion in the country, the lords in their luxe electric cars whiz past in the high-occupancy vehicle lanes they are entitled to use, which are also funded by the average Joes.

We do not need to speculate about the America the Democrats want to make, as they made the template in California. Young people who favor Bernie and think socialism is better than capitalism, take note. Middle-class women who think Hillary is the bomb, pay attention. For those of us on the right too often inclined to viciously attack various Republican candidates – think about what you are doing. Shredding our own and sending one bloodied into the general election is no way to defeat the statists. We have a republic, and we owe our Founders and our children our fervent efforts to keep it.