NewAge In California: This Is NOT A Philosophy

Victor Davis Hanson is continuing to call this the NewAge, without actually saying the word "NewAge". Today's target is one we've nailed on countless occasions - California:

The state's problems involve a larger "California philosophy" that is relatively new in its history; one that now curbs production but not consumption, and worries more about passing laws than how to pay for them.

California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to producing their own sources of oil, natural gas and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation to raise taxes and the easiest to pass costly new laws.

The state's mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California's Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs - costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off limits for new housing construction.

Most refined Californians who regulate how the state's natural resources are used live on the coast far away from - and do not always understand - those earthier people who struggle to develop them.

California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to come with legal status, speak English or arrive with high school diplomas, but then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico - but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.

If the professor studied NewAge he'd know what that "larger 'California philosophy' that is relatively new in its history" was.

Oh well, at least he got the "new" part right.