The wife and I spent the weekend in Southern California at the Libertarian Party of California’s annual state convention. We had a magnificent time.
RFK Jr and Cornel West joined several of the LP’s presidential candidates in two great panel discussions. I heard interesting and inspiring speeches given by David Friedman (Milton’s brilliant kid), Michael Boldin (of the wonderful 10th Amendment Center), and many more. I met some fabulous new friends and got to spend time with some fabulous old friends.
I hate the taxes, anti-gun laws, and stifling and destructive government in California, but I love the weather and have many friends there so I visit often.
Driving back to Vegas, I couldn’t help noticing that despite the massive taxes paid by the citizens in CA, the government was sure doing a crappy job doing one of it’s supposed “essential” functions — building and maintaining the roads.
As I bounced around on the crumbling and crowded freeway, I couldn’t help noticing all the signs of decay around me. Not everywhere, but disturbingly and depressingly noticeable.
Empty shopping centers, boarded up and gathering dust and graffiti. Cars rotting and rusting in front of abandoned houses crumbling from disuse. Fences long broken and unmended.
There’s going to be some of that stuff in any area, but this was abnormal. I got the sense of a creeping entropy gobbling up the place.
Without proper maintenance and care, the creations of man decay and fall into disrepair. Things fall apart. Forests swallow cities. Desert sand engulfs entire civilizations. It takes principled focus and effort to build order. It takes the same to maintain it.
And it isn’t just enough to “do stuff”. You have to do the right stuff. It isn’t as if California suffers from a lack of governmental effort. They do plenty of stuff. Unfortunately, much of it has been very destructive — especially lately.
And it shows.
I’m not saying California is doomed. It has a lot going for it. Natural beauty. Great weather. A lot of wonderful residents.
But it sure is suffering from neglect — worse, a poisoning — of the kind of principled stewardship that the things of man require. I hope the Californian’s figure out the error of their ways soon.
It would greatly help their cause if they paid more attention to (and supported) the Libertarian Party of California. The LPCA has the cure for what ails ya, Californians.
We got home safe and sound, and my “black-pilled” musings soon faded from my mind. One of the things that keeps me from getting too depressed about such things is a broad historical perspective.
“Where we’re at” right now isn’t so bad. And looking back at what we have gone through to get here (and the principles and values and ethics that helped or hurt that effort) really gives one a healthy perspective.
I received much of my historical perspective from Liberty Classroom, the dashboard university created by the great Tom Woods. I highly recommend it.
Take a look. If you like what you see, your purchase will help me keep doing what I do — and you’ll love the courses. They are top notch.
Naturally,
Adam
"Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact
Maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City"
Atlantic City
Bruce Springsteen
The thing is, when times are great and everything is growing, it's really easy (and often necessary) to expand infrastructure to accommodate all the new activity. And the go-go fever pitch makes it easy to get big. In an economy that hits its stride the investments pay out cash like nothing before. But when the situation changes, usually due to an innovation and another region capitalizing on it, no one is willing to scrap the old infrastructure and start over.
It's worse for municipalities because there's always that last holdout at the end of the road. He's not going anywhere, so you still have to supply him with the same services that you built when the street was full. Or buy him off, but that gets tricky too. So every town has the potential to become Detroit or Pittsburgh. In the case of Detroit, well, we all know what happened there. But in Pittsburgh, due to geography and historical norms, the actual city is fairly small. Greater Pitt is made up of a dozen or so boroughs and townships, independent governments that are fairly autonomous. Some do better than others, but the power and tax revenue is highly distributed. So some neighborhoods crumble, some thrive. And the money is spent locally. This meant that neighborhoods like Oakland were able to maintain a fairly good tax base (helps that University of Pittsburgh and CMU are there... another topic) and grow their high-tech and medical industry. This had a spillover effect for mostly residential Squirrel Hill, Wilkensburg and the other neighborhoods that didn't have to send their money to City Hall for redistribution.
So-cal is marketed as the Hollywood Tinseltown, but in reality oil and aerospace built the city of angles. Now that there are only two big airplane manufacturers in the world and oil is evil, the city is just running on momentum and the port. It's a mature/declining city. The best thing they could do is redefine the boundaries, cutting loose their old neighborhoods to let them become their own entities, with their own services. But we know that's never going to be an option, the cities are too addicted to the big number budgets and power-mad politics.