Reblogged:Foreigners See What Californians Miss

[Gus Van Horn blog]

The British Daily Mail has a piece on California's ongoing exodus which describes the conditions there that are causing long-time residents to leave.

More important, it offers a couple of quotes that illustrate how little many of those who flee seem to be aware of what went wrong.

First, though, the reporter did find someone who seems to have a good grasp of what's going on there:

Image by Benjamin Disinger, via Unsplash, license.

Delian Asparouhov is typical of those who turned California into such a powerhouse: a computer geek who attended the top-ranking Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched a space start-up, was backed by a billionaire and became a venture capitalist in the state. Yet this month the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur, still only 27, bought a house in Miami, Florida.

He said: "Silicon Valley has a stifling intellectual climate with its mono-culture that only allows one viewpoint to be expressed. It seems to espouse the same socialist values as the Soviet Union.

"So I am fleeing just like my parents fled a similar system for America when I was a kid."

...

... "California is a beautiful place with beautiful people but it's fraying. It is anti-growth, espouses diversity but does not implement it..." [format edits, bold added]

Leave it to an immigrant to see these things, and to a foreign paper to report them. And, while the Mail doesn't explicitly tie these socialist "values" to the policies that are ruining the state, it at least offers that as a possibility. Heck, it even mentions that California has been run by Democrats for ages and is a single-party state.

Asparouhov is, sadly for California and any state that might receive its refugees, quite atypical:

Younger people are most likely to contemplate leaving, according to polls -- even those who sympathise with the progressive politics of San Francisco, as I discovered in the sun-dappled Inner Sunset district beside Golden Gate Park.

This is an area popular with families, with teenage boys playing baseball and young girls kicking a football in the gorgeous park. Homes are considered comparatively affordable here -- yet the median price is more than $1million (about £700,000).

I met Kevin, a 36-year-old sound designer, who told me: "We won't stay long-term as we have two young kids and want a backyard. We might move to Portland [in neighbouring Oregon] since it has the same political culture, similar climate and is near the coast."

It is disturbing but worthwhile to consider: Most people find it easier to leave a hellhole than to consider the idea that the political policies they support might have created that hellhole. It is easy to come up for good reasons why this is the case, including two formidable ones: (1) The causal relationship is not obvious, and (2) the political beliefs are derived from deeply-held moral beliefs, the latter being hard enough to think about without the additional handicap of having been raised in a society that proclaims morality to be outside the province of reason.

-- CAV

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