The West Coast Is Totally Doomed

2025.09.13   prev     next

HERE’S a bell-type graph of the population, spread out over the political spectrum (leftist to rightist):

The area under the curve represents the number of persons who fall into each category. The “far” categories are a small but significant minority of the population; the great majority of persons fall into the “moderate” categories.

Here I do not use the descriptors “moderate” and “far” as merely an expression of degree. I use the term “moderate” to refer to persons who want a society that works, and are not willing to trash basic civil order and economic functionality in order to get what they want. Persons on the moderate left and moderate right may disagree with each other quite strongly, and they may vote for opposite candidates most of the time. But they have a strong, shared interest in keeping the basic system of human society functioning at least reasonably well.

Whereas persons in the “far” categories are willing to disrupt social order, civility, and functionality if that’s the consequence of passing the laws that they believe in.

The Left Coast

At the risk of looking like a rightist, I’m going to be criticizing exclusively the far left here. That’s not because the far right couldn’t cause just as many problems if/ when they become able to do so. But they haven’t — the far left has.

Here’s just one example case: Suppose I’m a far leftist, and I feel that the price of electricity shouldn’t go up over time. The typical citizen’s electric bill should be about the same, month-after-month, year-af­ter-year. It shouldn’t even go up with inflation. And it should be a very minor portion of that citizen’s budget. Meanwhile, the electricity should just keep coming. And no new power plants should be built: they’re ugly and they disrupt the natural beauty and sanctity of the environment. We should just make do with the stations we already have.

That vision is not realistic, and although some persons on the moderate left might sympathize with such a desire, they wouldn’t be willing to pass laws to force it to happen.

But persons on the far left would. Those persons might not even seem to be unreasonable people. They might be intelligent, gregarious, and well-spoken. But inside, they are willing to pass laws, or vote for politicians who will pass laws, to hold electric prices constant, and to effectively prohibit the construction of new power plants. And they’re willing even if doing so creates the very predictable problems a moderate person might warn of: rolling blackouts, wildfires ignited by aging, o­ver­load­ed lines, and worst of all, a slow, inevitable creep toward an impasse where all corners already have been cut, and the power company becomes unable to continue operating, due to an inability to pay its employees.

To the far leftist, if the power goes out and chaos ensues, that’s what society deserves for having a system where electric rates needed to go up, and power plants needed to be built. Or, the far leftist simply blames the most fortunate: ultra-rich executives at the top of the power company and its contractors, who should have tightened their belts, taken dramatically lower salaries, and used the savings to keep the system going for a while longer. Because they didn’t do that, they caused this crisis to happen.

Majority Report

The far left, like the far right, is kept in check by the fact that it’s a minority of the population. But over the past several decades, on the USA’s west coast (and maybe also in NYC), that situation has slowly changed. More and more far-left people have gravitated to the west coast, and eventually they reached a critical mass where they can actually pass this sort of legislation. And they have.

Legislative inertia, and the remaining contingent of moderate voters, have slowed the transformation for a while, but just in the past decade or two, it’s burst into full bloom. The far-leftists are able to pass the laws they want, and they know it. And they know they won’t be held accountable by the voters, because enough of those also are far-left, and won’t vote a­gainst a far-left candidate no matter what’s happening. Condemn the corporations and the billionaires, and just keep rolling down that cliff.

Movin’ Out

Are the recent severe problems of the west coast perhaps just a temporary calamity, until there’s some sort of ballot-box correction? I seriously doubt it. The people most likely to vote for a rightist (or even for a moderate leftist) are starting to move away from the west coast. As the situation gets worse, even more of those reasonable voters will move away, and the far-left’s electoral lock will get only much stronger.

And to those far-left politicians and voters, the idea of reversing any of this is simply anathema. To a far-leftist, passing a new tax on the rich, to pay for a new program for the poor, is, of course, desirable. But once enacted, repealing that tax would be not just undesirable, but positively vile. It would be taking from the poor to give to the very rich! What a sick, cruel, sadistic thing to do. We can never do that, no matter what’s happening to our city or to our state.

Before It Can Get Even Worse...

The current socioeconomic problems of west coast cities and states are just the bare beginnings of how bad I think this going to get. I’m not saying it has to get worse before it gets better. I’m saying it has to get worse before it gets fantastically worse than that — then even worse still. The End.

Goodbye, west coast. We’ll all remember, via old movies and TV shows, what you used to be.

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