National Review
November 2009

Victo Davis Hanson

Tarnished state: but California can shine again

California is the nation’s most populous state, at nearly 37 million, and if it were a country, it would have the world’s eighth-largest economy. Yet there is still room for growth: Two-thirds of the area north of San Francisco remains sparsely inhabited and rich in minerals, farmland, and timber, and billions of barrels of untapped oil lie off the coast and in the southern interior. Meanwhile, the harbors at San Diego and San Francisco Bay are among the world’s finest and busiest. California is the nation’s richest and most diverse agricultural producer. Tourists flock to Disneyland, the Napa Valley vineyards, and Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, and Death Valley national parks. Despite the inroads of globalization, Silicon Valley still leads the world in computer innovation, and Hollywood still reigns as the moviemaking capital. Universities such as Stanford, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA continue to rank among the nation’s finest.

How, then, has everything gone so wrong so fast? The state is in a mess far worse than its 1992-93 and 2002-03 financial crises, or the periodic natural calamities of earthquake, drought, mudslide, and wildfire. Odder still, most residents well understand the current symptoms, the underlying disease that accounts for them, and why the state is so susceptible to this self-induced malady in the first place; yet no cure is in sight.

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Anywhere from 3 to 6 million illegal aliens burden the state’s health, welfare, and criminal-justice systems. (No one knows the exact size of the undocumented population–either in California or in the nation at large–since vastly different measures are employed by supporters and opponents to either emphasize or downplay the problem.) In performance reviews of the nation’s public schools, California ranks between 47th and 49th. California also runs the largest, most expensive, and most recidivism-prone state prison system in the country: Half of all parolees will end up back in prison within two years. Locking up 173,000 inmates–over 20 percent of them illegal aliens–costs taxpayers more than $8 billion a year. Though the system was recently expanded at great cost, it still is designed to hold only half of its present population. More HERE from Bnet