By Robert J. Ringer
There’s been a lot of talk recently about California seceding from the union. It’s akin to Hollywood celebs vowing to move out of the country if a Republican wins the White House. Meaning that it’s all bluster. Those who extol the virtues of the People’s Republic of California love to make hollow threats, but they possess neither the courage nor the financial resources to back them up.
If California were ever on its own, within six months of its “independence” it would be unable to function at even a survival level. Though it boasts the sixth largest economy in the world (larger than that of both Brazil and France!), there’s no economy big enough to keep a Marxist country afloat. This has been demonstrated time and again in such failed nations as Cuba, the Soviet Union, Mozambique, and every other country that has experimented with socialism/communism in any of its hideous forms.
The majority of California’s adult population consists of adult-children whose brains have never developed beyond adolescence. They cling to a stunted Woodstock mentality that makes them incapable of rational thought, which, if not addressed professionally, has the potential to be fatal. They live in an Oz-like land of constant frustration, which causes them to resort to tantrums and violence as the combined solution to every perceived problem.
The bottom line to all this is that a majority of Californians are not able to function as self-sustaining adults in the real world, so they irrationally dedicate themselves to the impossible task of trying to remake our imperfect world into a perfect world they create in their soiled minds.
Such an immature and naïve mental state can have dire consequences not only for the individual who is saddled with it, but for rational people of goodwill who live in the same societal space as they do. It’s dangerous to everyone, because those who are part of the Radical Left, in particular, employ lies, slander, and violence day-in-and-day-out in an attempt to achieve their impossible goal of creating the perfect world they envision in their minds.
I lived in Southern California for about 20 years, and I loved it for about ten of those years. It was a period when seemingly everything that happened was wonderful — meeting and marrying the most beautiful, kindest, most caring woman in the world, enjoying my four children as they progressed through grade school, middle school, and high school, rising from oblivion to the pinnacle of the book-publishing world by writing and self-publishing two New York Times #1 bestsellers, and much, much more.
But as we rolled into the eighties, the glitzy lifestyle of Los Angeles began to lose its appeal for me. Being surrounded by millions of Hollywood types and, worse, wannabe Hollywood types, became a painful daily task. I grew tired of seeing people with no visible means of support driving Rolls-Royces and living in rented mansions.
Above all, the left-wing political craziness and political correctness began to wear me down. I got tired of debating low-information people — and, worse, no-information people — and increasingly found myself withdrawing from the outside world.
I slowly faced up to the reality that people in Southern California had a collective mental disorder that caused them to talk and act in ways that was completely foreign to how the rest of the nation thought or behaved.
I remember many years ago Paul Newman saying that “Los Angeles is like a beautiful lady dying of cancer.” Notwithstanding his liberal credentials, Newman nailed it. For sheer luxury and beauty, it’s hard to beat Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, and Bel Air, but, with just a few exceptions, most of the rest of Los Angeles is a sewer.
I became convinced, and today am certain, that California cannot be saved. It long ago passed the tipping point, and is now a giant left-wing cauldron boiling over with hatred, intolerance, and violence. It’s gigantic GDP can’t save it, because when GDP in California increases, it always brings with it an increase in welfare benefits. The Sacramento beast has an insatiable appetite for vote-buying entitlements, regulations, and illegal schemes.
Continue: EconomicPolicyJournal.com: A Toast to California’s Secession