The secessionist movement in California has made created an environment that is looking more and more like the chaos depicted in the 1982 science fiction movie “The Blade Runner”, or so writes Brent Staples in today’s New York Times (zero-priced registration required). Writes Staples:
“The pollution [in Los Angeles] is horrendous. The rich have withdrawn into fortress-style towers. The avenues teem with unruly, eccentrically dressed immigrants who speak a rough street language instead of English. References to these scenes show up everywhere, from books about politics to civic-planning documents like ‘L.A. 2000,’ a look at the future commissioned by Tom Bradley, when he was mayor of the city in the 1980’s. The report warned that the region might deteriorate into a scene from ‘Blade Runner’: a featureless sprawl seething with class and ethnic hostilities.
[...]
“Fear of Blade Runnerization and the belief that the affluent should spend their tax dollars only on themselves have generated a pattern of civic secession. Wealthy and middle-class Californians have increasingly withdrawn into gated communities that thrive while the older, poorer counties they have fled struggle along on a diminished tax base. The people in the new, homogenous communities tend to be extreme localists who drop out of the broader civic life. When they do engage statewide politics, they tend to do it with ballot initiatives that slash tax revenues, hamstring the Legislature and generally cut the civic ties that bind citizens in one place to those at the far end of the state.”
So this is the latest threat from the New Hobbesians: Stop withdrawing from society in order to avoid wealth redistribution or risk a bleak future. Staples is blind to the obvious cause of the secession—that decades of State intervention has destroyed whatever impulses toward noblesse oblige that existed in society, creating a situation in which the rich and middle classes see no benefit in mingling with other classes. Why assume moral responsibility for the poor and otherwise less fortunate when the State demands a monopoly role in these matters? Why not take steps to protect property in the face of out-of-control and failing public sector bureaucracies that never cease increasing claims on the wealth producers?
The fact is that the urge toward secession intensifies whenever the pilfered decide they have had enough, and that such efforts are often the last remaining checks on the expansion of government at all levels. It is also a fact that all parties are better off following peaceful secession, whether it occurs on a micro level (gated-communities), or on a macro level (nation-states). Those who argue otherwise do not have the examples of history on their side.
