The problem with socialism is that it is not a natural, organic state for human beings. We don't like being forced to support others, especially when we can barely take care of our own. Ultimately in socialism, people discover it is easier to give up trying and take the free hand-outs, which leaves no one to do productive work. The system ultimately collapses under its own idealism.
The first step always seems reasonable. "Hey! We'll carve off a little pie to share with folks who are down on their luck," is how it begins. Everyone thinks it's not a bad idea giving an extra nickel or two a month to help out. Then the inevitable happens: a bureaucracy springs up to administer the "charity", which requires additional layers of bureaucrats to watch the watchers, while more people are included in the largess and the ballooning costs require a marketing campaign to keep people volutarily paying into the system.
After a while, you've got an uncontrollable bureaucracy administering vast sums of money taking care of ever-swelling groups of qualified recipients while the bite of productive people's pie is getting bigger, eventually forcing 100% of the population into the hand-out system and no one doing the work, all the while being head-bashed with slick ad campaigns saying how wonderful it all is.
Naturally, the whole thing collapses in a dramatic heap of failed idealism.
Back to California.
For decades, the state has prided itself (read marketing campaign) on being a left-wing paradise. Food dripped from trees, eternal sunshine bathed golden beaches, everyone had everything while doing nothing. It was glorious, until...
Along comes a winter with storm after noahide storm, caused as much by natural cycles as by Fukushima radiation literally boiling the Pacific Ocean. The vast and sudden dump of water on the state has exposed huge gaps in infrastructure maintenance caused by enormous amounts of the state's budget going to handing out charity to millions of people who have no intention of becoming productive members of society and eventually paying into the system.
Since the state's educational system was devoted almost entirely to marketing the glorious socialist paradise, no one apparently learned the Laws of Thermodynamics. All systems require constant input of energy to maintain order or they will collapse to a neutral state of being.
Thus, a dam or a street require a certain level of constant input of energy in order to keep them functioning as intended. If that energy is siphoned off for other things, then at some point the systems must collapse.
This is the inherent fallacy of socialism: once every part of a system is taking energy out, then no energy is being put into maintaining it, and it will (usually dramatically) implode. California's socialist paradise has come at the expense of productive input. Even the state's energy must come from outside because it has regulated the energy industry into non-existence so as not to ruin the views from Malibu with oil rigs and gas pipelines.
The storms this year are one of those unexpected events that catalyze the collapse of systems. Under normal circumstances, the system erodes so slowly that most people don't notice it right away. They slowly adjust their expectations to compensate for the minor changes, thus normalizing the decay.
But along comes a serious of massive storms, or perhaps a devastating earthquake, or some similar event. The system, already weakened from years of neglect, falls in on itself in a sudden and dramatic event - much like the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the nature or and ultimate outcome of all socialist systems, from the fall of Rome to the collapse of California infrastructure. It is as inevitable as the sunrise.
In the end, this is why a global government can never last, especially one based on the unfeasilbe theory of socialism. The system would be so complex that at some point it would require all available resources to maintain the status quo, meaning the sacrifice of growth. In this delicate equilibrium, one sudden event would topple the entire thing.
The only viable solution is small, controllable systems that are uniquely tailored to each community. The infrastructure develops according to the resources available at the local level and the ingenuity of the local inhabitants. This is far easier and cheaper to maintain.
One-size-fits-all systems require far more energy input, are much less flexible, and exceed the resources of any one community to maintain.
We are likely, sooner rather than later, to start seeing more and more systems collapse in California fashion. The century-long goosestep to socialist paradise must reduce itself to rubble, as it has no choice in the matter. It is the nature of the system, whether the systems are corporate or national.
California is a microcosm of what is coming down the pike globally. As systems collapse, they will absorb more resources to maintain until the number of collapsing systems will overwhelm the productivity and resources available. It is a Universal Truth that cannot be legislated or bureaucratized away.
Only small, agile and adaptive systems at a community level, interlinked to its immediate neighbors, can answer the demands of a global civilization. Global solutions are doomed from the start by the weight of their own demands on resources. Global corporations and government are not the solutions, they are the problems, and California is our test tube example du jour, since we have obviously forgotten the lesson of the Soviet Union.
Mark well California's demise.
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