California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion. As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state. Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.* Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?
I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle. Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream? A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.
The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog. Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.
All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government. Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes. While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution. Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches? Could be.
Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”. All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government. I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them. At heart, then, this is Stalinism.
Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent. The hippies were a mess, though. Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists. Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.
The hippies of yore (1960’s).
Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle. In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.
Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin. Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges. No greenie would stand for that … I hope. Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning. The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it. In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests. Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target. Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background. The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought. It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.
Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit. In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design. For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.
An artist’s conception of the surface of Venus.
So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states. How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?
1948 USSR propaganda poster. It reads, “Let’s carry out the five-year plan in four years”.
Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies. Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).
To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms. Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines. Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.
Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100. It proclaims the state to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one. Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.
How’s that to be actualized? Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren. Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar. To make it all happen, let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.
Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:
Wind turbines dot the landscape in Mojave, Calif.The 200-acre Waianae Solar Project in West Oahu, Hawaii.
Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels. Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results. More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.
The abandoned Soviet city of Chukotka, eastern Siberia.Abandoned Soviet-era collective farm.
Markets Do It Better But Don’t Tell the Central Planners
That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns). Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”. In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do. Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society. Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.
Hayek addresses a class at the London School of Economics in 1948.
F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”. He wrote,
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)
Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters. Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.
What? They don’t know it all? Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe. If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”. Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.
Stalin and Yezhov, 1937.
The chips?
The Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33, as captured in an American newspaper from the time. Massive starvation was the result of a Soviet takeover of agriculture as per the 5-Year Plan, and the use of starvation as a weapon to quell opposition.
Hey, I Can’t Afford My Electricy Bill!
And there will be hiccups. Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The rich can always afford to go green. Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled. But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill. By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it. Sweat.
As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic. There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr? The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc. The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1) Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.
Example of a High Usage Charge on a Southern California Edison bill from their website.
The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2) You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof. What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say. Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid. All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill. And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer. Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.
The Peasants Are Coming And They Look Angry.
The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills. You’ve heard of racial disparities, right? Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge. The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on. And you know what? The peasants are looking for their pitchforks. The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.
Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland. A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred – has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3) Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….
Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments. Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander. It’s a well-worn script.
It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit. The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”. One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.
The logic is unassailable. Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage. The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market. No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio. Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) – and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.
Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées. The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”. A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5) The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.
Ecotopia?
Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.
So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura. It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs. The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used. If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)? Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?
California Air Resources Board chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols.Nichols’s inspiration? Nikolai K. Baibakov, head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) 1955-57 and 1965-85.
Success in court isn’t likely. The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions. Maybe that’s how it should be. If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be. The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.
The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works. They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings. Stalin would be proud of his progeny.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
“Time-Of-Use (TOU) Rate Plans”, Southern California Edison, https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans/!ut/p/b1/pVJNc4IwEP0tHjhiNgQl7S1tLcL4UcVW4eIEjEgHA0Ja2_76RseL06p1mtPuztuXt7sPRWiGIsnfs5SrrJA83-VRe-57Dwy7tuUNg4EDDAedvjvqkQ6zNSDUADjxGOz7MXVZ1wvAc59aNni-MwHHCTB9dNAURShKpCrVCoV1IuZJIZWQai6kAYfYgErU2UJHGc91wpWoj2pmmXO5IyqTbIHCFudtGtOlyTERpk1jbHJHpxQvktgWLRILfBB-RtmFwf1Lk-kPrKp_30-1LK5WZiaXBZr9UL1fwBHT2LE000unN7zDFlDrALhxodP1hxowGRHwyAgGAWMEoH0AnDmCFpvmRbw_aMhkTKhWVYmlqETVfKt0eaVUWd8aYMB2u22mRZHmopkUawN-a1kVtUKzYyQK9Uad0ysjKLjyROcJR3A1of8HN2evm03EtCd33vvQU_7PlOX6eU3JpxnF7XH3qyemJo8pkFaeNhrfvJkzbg!!/dl4/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/
“Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need”, LA Times, Feb. 5, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
A description of “The Two Hundred” can be found from their website: http://www.ccbuilders.org/project/the-two-hundred-project/
“California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups”, Robert Bryce, National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/
“Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future”, Robert Kunzig, National Geographic Magazine, November 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/11/germany-renewable-energy-revolution/
“Why California Has the Nation’s Worst Poverty Rate”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 1/17/2018, https://mises.org/wire/why-california-has-nations-worst-poverty-rate-1
“On the relevance of Hayek: centralized economic planning is dead”, Alex Cartwright, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 6/10/2013, https://home.isi.org/relevance-hayek-centralized-economic-planning-dead
“Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning”, Tibor R. Machan, 6/1/1988, https://fee.org/articles/beyond-hayek-a-critique-of-central-planning/
“Hayek: The Knowledge Problem”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 10/28/2014, https://fee.org/articles/hayek-the-knowledge-problem/
Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco), House Minority Leader
Reprehensible behavior:
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The results of the soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania 18th congressional district election signals a rising tide for the Democrats in November, but not because of any great love for their lefty ideas.
Conor Lamb (D), winning candidate in the 18th congressional district race.
Their (Dems) fortunes rose in direct proportion to the repulsiveness and churlishness of a president with a “R” after his name. Trump is the accelerant for this state of affairs, not love for SDS-type values. (SDS: the 60’s Students for Democratic Society – Tom Hayden’s, et al, group for bringing socialism to America).
This is an election year that will pivot on the choice between reprehensible ideas (Democrats) vs. reprehensible behavior (Trump). Trump has soiled the “R” label. It’s a sad situation when people react to deplorable conduct by turning to people with deplorable ideas.
Time to recycle the wisdom of the historian Robert Blake: ““The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.” We might see it play out in November, and maybe two years later.
Robert Blake, historian, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Say good-bye to your tax cut and guns; say hello to incessant impeachment dramas and the Californication of the federal government.
The following is a commentary to “Sessions: ‘I will recuse myself’ from investigations when appropriate”, Washington Examiner, 3/2/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sessions-i-will-recuse-myself-from-investigations-when-appropriate/article/2616229?fb_action_ids=416334178716129&fb_action_types=og.comments.
Tempest in a teapot: Sessions having 2 short encounters with Russia’s ambassador. If an ambassador doesn’t develop relationships with a country’s policy-makers, what’s the guy to do? As senator and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, is Sessions to run at the mere sight of an approaching Russian diplomat? Nonsense, nonsense.
Andrew Puzder
Tempest in a teapot: Andy Puzder “unacceptable” for Labor Secretary for a messy divorce, disproven accusations of spousal abuse, and hiring an “undocumented” person. Such allegations would automatically exclude anyone with the income to hire domestic help, and that means the Democrat senators pompously grilling Puzder. More nonsense.
Jerry Brown (l) and Meg Whitman (r) shake hands before 2010 debateIllegal immigrant maid and attorney Gloria Allred at press conference, Sept. 29, 2010
Tempest in a teapot: Meg Whitman, California Republican gubernatorial candidate, hiring an “undocumented” person for domestic help. This is smaller than a teapot. Try a thimble. More nonsense.
Kimba Wood, Pres. Clinton’s second nominee for Attorney General
Tempest in a teapot: Kimba Wood, Clinton’s Attorney General nominee, employing an “undocumented” nanny. Proof that dippiness is a bi-partisan sport. More thimble-scale nonsense on parade.
Zoe Baird, Pres. Clinton’s first nominee for Attorney General
Tempest in a teapot: Zoe Baird, Clinton’s first nominee for Attorney General, drug over the coals for similarly employing an “undocumented” nanny. Apparently there was a dragnet for “undocumented” nannies at the time. More partisan dippiness.
Were there other episodes in theatrical grandstanding, and are we likely to experience more? Probably. Our press and partisan inquisitors are more interested in chasing down the employment records of nannies, maids, and gardeners, while culling divorce records and chasing down chance encounters during years of service in the public eye, than a mature examination of a person for their policy preferences. Ideological biases will have a greater impact on whether a citizen can even operate a wedding cake business.
Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the Scottish throne.
To borrow from Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The following was a response to an article by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review Online, “Abolish President’s Day”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445013/presidents-day-imperial-cult
KDW, interesting idea about abolishing President’s Day – one that I find intriguing. Electing a president, as popularly viewed, has nearly become an exercise in choosing our next 4-year emperor. Most risible is the infantile incantations about him (or her, but we haven’t had one yet) as the “leader of the economy” and “leader of the people”, a grand vizier, or caliph, of all living souls within the country.
We even have our own Roman Forum in the form of the Washington Mall. The Lincoln Memorial is as close to a functioning temple as one can possibly get, with its gargantuan Athena-like statue. Still missing, though, are the vestial virgins and temple priests.
Artists rendering of the Roman ForumThe National Mall, Washington, D.C., looking west.
Watch that space for raising Obama to the godhead.
Are we morphing from a self-governing citizenry into adolescent dependencies of a father-god? Even more profound, are we now the kind of people who desire persons to worship since the traditional object of veneration is held in disrepute by the fashionable currents of lifestyle progressivism? The gigantic and ostentatious has replaced the humility and modesty more appropriate for a republic.
