Seven years of near madness -- Victor Davis Hanson

VDH has succinctly summarized here the second Bush term, the irrational behavior of the left media and politicians, the rise and election of Obama and the return to reality in 2010.  As is his wont, Hanson brings the historian's perspective to recent history.  After all his recounting and analysis of this period, one is left to wonder exactly what caused the left to become thoroughly unhinged and irrational.  He offers the partial explanation that after years of out of power they saw the opportunity to  rally voters around the unpopularity of the prolonged conflict in Iraq conveniently forgetting that they had agreed with Bush about going into that country and all the rest.  As they always do, the democrats, with no principles other than the exercise of power, turned the full fury of their captive media and academia against the republicans giving us in the process the Hope and Change presidency.  If Obama is reelected all bets are off on the future of the US, at least as the country we have known in the past.

California and the recession

Victor Davis Hanson is a practical, intellectual farmer, much like say Thomas Jefferson without the same political office holding aspirations. What's interesting about Hanson is his understanding of the macro economics of the micro economic environment in which he finds himself in Central California.  His comments on the "wealth" of the unemployed, their access to various government social safety net programs and not least their ability to operate in a vast cash economy in which they pay no taxes on part time work (yet remain the beneficiaries of these government programs) and finally their access to credit lines and vouchers for housing and food stamps.  Hanson contrasts the "affluence" of the unemployed poor with the working poor of his grandparents 1930's generation.  He also talks about the reasons why industry is not moving into this area to take advantage of this idle and presumably cheap source of labor singling  out the state taxes and regulatory environment as principal culprits.  All in all it's a dangerous brew of unemployment and government largesse that cannot continue since we now know the socialist politicians have finally run out of other peoples's money and the prospects for jobs remain weak. Hanson thinks we are living in "dangerous times" quite possibly leading to major social upheaval on the order of magnitude that brought on the horror of the Soviet Union.  Let's hope this draconian perspective is overstated and yet until the time when we return to a system that values work over handouts and freebies to big swaths of the population, he just may be right.  After all, if the government no longer has the ability to buy a lot of people's comfy lifestyle, those people are liable to get very angry sooner or later.  Hanson's article is here.

California in trouble

Victor Davis Hanson points out the obvious.  Yuk!