Is This America's Fate? A Must-Read From California

By Barry Rubin

While this is far outside what Rubin Reports usually covers, I just have to direct you to Victor Davis Hanson's article on his travels through central California, which charts the disintegration into a Third World situation in that part of the state. Notice that none of this kind of thing is being reported in the mass media, where California's race toward bankruptcy seems to motivate only puzzlement or the advocacy of Federal bail-outs.

Hanson's deliberately refraining from taking any political or moral stance about what he is describing makes the account all the more devastating. It reads almost like a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel (A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind). What is really amazing is the gap between this reality and the smug Politically Correct, environmentally obsessed, ideology that runs the state.

Come to think of it, reminds me of the great novelist John Steinbeck's documentation of California during the (first?) Great Depression of the 1930s. If you haven't read this piece you are missing something enormous about our current times.

Again, even if you think you have zero interest in this subject, I urge you to read Hanson's article because--sorry to say--it might indicate the fate of America if it doesn't get off those disintegrating dirt roads down which Hanson bicycled.

I do not see this as an article about immigration, or at least about anything other than totally uncontrolled in any way, totally unlimited immigration. The important points for me are:

Government is collapsing;

Regulation is strangling productivity, ruining the economy and creating unemployment;

The media is not covering these stories for political reasons and thus it is harder to develop pressure for finding solutions;

Environmentalism often ignores the more critical threats to the environment;

California is in crisis and no one is going to emergency mode but seem to be waiting around for bankruptcy and the demand for Federal bailouts.