California’s new conservatism, often misleadingly called progressivism, seeks to prevent change by discouraging everything – from the construction of new job-generating infrastructure to virtually any kind of family-friendly housing. The resulting ill-effects on the state’s enormous population of poor and near-poor – roughly-one third of households – have been profound, although widely celebrated by the state’s gentry class.
But then again, nobody these gentry class types know is being screwed by the state's policies that make the new lords and ladies feel like they are still the proper-thinking college students they once were:
Easy money translated into a utopian view of living. Higher taxes were a small price to pay for the psychological reassurance that a millionaire was still liberal. Professions of abstract progressive piety make guilt-free grasping materialism possible. I suppose if you make $800,000, having your legislature outlaw dogs chasing bears and bobcats instead of building a reservoir makes you feel as if you make $80,000.
Hey, the fellow gentry class in the Washington, D.C.-to-New York City corridor applauds them. That's who they know.
Oh, and while the world watched the Super Bowl, don't look at the wretched outside of the guarded compounds of the technology elites.
