Scorched Earth

A recent NY Times report discussed the “diaspora” of people from blue states to red states. The Times seems to welcome this movement, since, at least according to its analysis, those relocaters are keeping their blue-state voting habits and thus are helping the Democrats in national elections.

I recall a lament, years back, from a native Nevadan who enjoyed the liberty that state offered. He noted that people were moving to Nevada from California, at least in part to get away from the strangling overregulation, overtaxation and over-governing that are hallmarks of the Golden State. Unfortunately, they brought their big-government desires and mindset with them, and enough moved there to cause a shift in the political climate and in elections. The new arrivals brought with them the things that they might have been looking to leave behind.

Certainly, many leave blue states because they don’t like the blue-ness of those states, but if the Times article is correct (and while the article reeks of wishful thinking, history supports its being at least partly right) liberals are moving on to greener pastures intent on living in them the way they lived in the places they left. There’s no recognition, presumably, that their beliefs, attitudes and demands (not to mention voting preferences) may have contributed to the climate they sought to leave.

Several parallels come to mind.

The first, Detroit, is a stark result of decades of statism and progressive policies. Detroit hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1961. The City Council has had exactly one Republican since 1970. One might think that one-party rule would bring about progressive paradise, but instead it turned into a corrupt patronage machine, thriving on racial animus and prompting decades of population flight. Today, it’s $20 billion in debt and the poster child for what happens government run amok.

The second is actually several. Numerous empires throughout history have kept their treasuries full by conquering and pillaging surrounding nations. They supported the lifestyles they had grown accustomed to by “harvesting” the wealth of other nations. Certainly, if your economy and society are such that external wealth is necessary to keep them afloat, you’re doing something wrong.

This brings us to the third example, Venezuela. That socialist paradise, which as of 2 years ago had the largest proven oil reserves in the world, suffers from double digit unemployment, rampant inflation and wage decline, loss of industry, and shortages of everything from meat to milk to toilet paper. Venezuela has nationalized company after company and industry after industry in order to try and keep up with the incredible drain its welfare policies have imposed. Venezuela isn’t in a position to expand outward in order to acquire wealth, so the government simply takes it from the productive private sector.

The fourth? Locusts. When they swarm, they consume everything edible in their path, leaving behind great swathes of devastation. They suck all the nutrition, all the “good” out of the land and move on to greener pastures.

Marching armies of yore would live off the land where they could. Some might show some prudence, recognizing that the lands they are conquering will be part of their nation going forward. But others will take all they can pillage and plunder, leaving ruin in their wake.

It is, of course, an exaggeration to equate the flight of Democrats from blue states to red states with any of these examples of ravaging overconsumption, but all have a commonality: the beliefs and policies all embrace had a deleterious effect on their “home turf,” prompting them to look and move outward. We might infer another commonality, the end result. Expansionist empires all eventually collapsed when they hit “walls” i.e. nations they couldn’t conquer, and they thus had to pay the price for their unsustainable internal structures. Venezuela is in a position of “change or die” (and we might surmise that Red China and the USSR faced that same choice, with different decisions and results). Locusts? Their swarms are intermittent things, separated by many years of dormancy. Theirs is certainly not a steady-state sustainable situation.

Part of Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation on socialism is:

… Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything …

We are certainly witnessing this phenomenon. At the federal level, we have a tax structure that’s more progressive than many of the social democracies of Europe, yet “the rich” continue to be the target of the taxers. The dollar has lost 97% of its value since the creation of the Federal Reserve. And, while we aren’t witnessing actual nationalization of companies and industries, government’s been exerting ever-increasing control over the private sector (and engaging in a twisted form of nationalization with the GM bankruptcy, the bailouts and too-big-to-fail). In the worst of the states, we see massive and bloated public sectors, enormous and growing wealth redistribution systems, government favoritism toward unions, rampant cronyism, and yes, oodles of corruption. While it is true that we are not experiencing actual socialism in this nation (by the book, socialism involves government ownership of the means of production), in a colloquial sense the Left embraces ideas and policies that are socialist/statist in flavor. Government doing more, regulating more, involving itself in more, all these may not be according-to-Hoyle socialism, but they certainly are “looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck” telltales.

One of the greatest aspects of this nation’s political system is its federalist structure. Distributing political power and authority fosters a market dynamic by giving people the ability to change the rules under which they live by changing states in which they live. This has certainly slowed the march towards statism, but, as federal power grows, state power and the differences between states diminish. Market discipline becomes less influential. And, as blue-staters bring progressivism and liberalism to red states, beating back socialism becomes harder and harder.

What will it take for the people fleeing states like New York, California, Michigan and Illinois to realize that, like ships carrying plague-flea-infested rats, they are carrying the seeds of that which may have prompted them to leave their native states? What manner of wake-up call do statists need to realize the problem isn’t their old location or the people surrounding them, but rather the attitudes and beliefs they themselves cling to? Perhaps a taste of greater liberty might open the eyes of some (although red-state certainly isn’t synonymous with liberty, especially on social issues), but it’s as likely some of these states will be put upon the same statist spiral as the blue states that are being abandoned. When the red states start turning blue, when they start suffering from the same problems that those who migrated there sought to escape, what then? Move again?

We can point out the damage done by big-government policies. We can look at Detroit, we can look at Stockton and San Bernadino (all have gone bankrupt), we can look at the massive debt and crushing obligations some states have assumed, and we can point at the statism that brought those cities to their knees and those states to malaise, but people are stubborn in their beliefs. They may have scorched the earth of their old homes, but those who cannot (or will not) remember (or accept their role in) the past are doomed to repeat it.