The pattern is now all too familiar. Some disaster strikes. On closer examination, it should have been anticipated. Not only that: Terrible policy decisions made it inevitable. The jaw drops and the mind reels.
Officials don’t admit what they have done, however, but instead make excuses and blame everyone but themselves. Incompetence and corruption make a clown show out of the response to the crisis. Then comes the resulting solution: the transfer of wealth, always from us to them.
How many times have we been here? We have lost count.
The horror of the fires in Los Angeles inspires deep sadness for the victims and a desperate public desire to help and to know how this came to be. Fire control has been a priority of civilized living since the ancient world. How could history’s richest and most highly educated population areas have failed so completely and so miserably?
We can count the ways:
1. Fire control officials and leadership were mostly diversity, equity, and inclusion hires—people put there not because of knowledge or experience but because of demographic choices. Box-checking for virtue signaling. In their earlier interviews, they spoke mostly about intersectionality, not fire control. That’s how crazy this ideology has become. Not even the imminent threat of death by fire could shake “woke” towns and cities from prioritizing postmodern obsessions with race, gender, and sexual identity.
2. There is a huge shortage of actual fire control workers, mostly due to vaccine mandates that caused thousands of people to leave the profession entirely. This weakened not only firefighting forces but also health care and transportation workforces, displacing multitudes from jobs they loved to something else. This is another point that everyone knows but that the corporate media are afraid to admit. They ended up with a firefighting force dominated by compliant supplicants.
3. The empty fire hydrants (they were just there for the designer dogs to use on walks) and water shortages shocked everyone. Upon closer examination, the governor of the state had made videos already about dismantling dams that provide city water so that fish could live a happier life. There was no drought to scapegoat, either: Rainfall had been at normal or above-normal levels. Meanwhile, mission-critical reservoirs were drained for maintenance, closed for the season of high winds when the water is most needed.
4. Officials in California have long restricted controlled burning, which is absolutely essential for fire control. Otherwise, nature creates a tinderbox. One never worries about this in a state of nature: Fires come and go, but once you build and civilize, you need some other plan besides issuing a fatwa on all burning forever. California residents can tell you stories: Property owners can hardly get permission to remove a felled tree.
5. Fire insurance premiums had been controlled in their pricing by the government, driving out many insurance companies and leaving homeowners in a lurch. It has been known for thousands of years that price control leads to shortages. Leave it to the wealthiest and most educated cohorts to imagine that they are smarter than the whole of human history. As a result, taxpayers are going to foot the rebuilding bill.
The list stops there, but we could probably add a zero and not get to the end of the outrages.
Then you have the looting problem, which, until recently, was mostly legal in California (Proposition 47, passed in 2014). The governor actually opposed the repeal of the law that forgave thefts of less than $950. The criminals did not get the message and took advantage, creating a hellscape of stealing anything not burning amid an inferno of destruction.
That only scratches the surface of the particular problems of a larger one, which can be summarized as the ideological penchant to live in a dream world. This is the essence of the dominant tendency of California’s political leaders. They have come to believe that they can create any reality they want by their own imaginings, never having to defer to forces of nature, human experience, or economic realities.
Anything that contradicts the fantasy is dubbed “misinformation.” And sure enough, even with fires raging and people dying, California officials have taken the time to rage against Alex Jones and random social media accounts for supposed inaccuracies on the conditions there. They have spent more time fighting free speech than raging fires.
If we thought the out-migration from California was high before, we haven’t begun to see what this latest calamity will bring. Anyone who can will escape. It is now obvious that the ruling elite in the state is nowhere near prepared to deal with any real crisis and, moreover, that many of the crises are created by the elite themselves, from water shortages to electricity rationing to impossible home prices.
Most of the thousands of homes that were destroyed long predated this insane regulatory machinery. They could not and would not exist today. They were owned by old money, for the most part, and those same owners could never get into the wildly inflated market today.
There is simply no way to rebuild them under the current thicket of laws. It’s the California regulatory code that should have gone up in flames, every rule and regulation imposed for decades, probably since World War II.
Otherwise, we are going to end up with a tax-funded, big-developer bonanza of huge housing structures such as that of Eastern Europe when socialism was the rage. The masters of concrete will collaborate with government to move billions of dollars from the people to the elites, resulting in structures in which no one would ever want to live.
The combination of folly, tragedy, and suffering is painful to watch. Here we have a state with beauty like few places in the world and weather to match. It’s hard to imagine a set of conditions that would make such a place unlivable. Somehow, the educated and wealthy elite of this coastal utopia managed to do it. It now occupies the ignoble status of history’s exhibit A of how bad decision-making, messed up priorities, the exaltation of incompetence, high taxation, hyperregulation, and rule by woke bureaucracy end up creating an apocalypse.
Many of us have wondered for years what it will take for the media and Hollywood elite to become aware of the errors of their thinking and their ways. One suspects that this might finally be the moment. When you see a parade of know-nothings giving press conferences with no content and leaders running for cover in the face of unspeakable calamity, it is highly likely that change follows.
All of which gets us to the key lesson of the past five or so years. These debates over freedom, property rights, rule of law, and the liberty of the citizens are not merely intellectual parlor games. They are not just for faculty lounges and dorm rooms. They are not merely for entertainment in social media groups and debate societies.
We are literally faced with a choice of life or death, not only for ourselves and those we love but for civilization itself.
