“We are literally faced with a choice of life or death, not only of ourselves and those we love but civilization itself.”
Commentary The pattern is now all-too-familiar. Some disaster strikes. On closer examination, it should have been anticipated. Not only that: prior terrible policy decisions made it inevitable. The jaw drops and the mind reels. Officials don’t admit what they have done, however, but instead make excuses and blame everyone but themselves. Incompetence and corruption make a clown show out of the response to the crisis. Then comes the resulting solution: transfer wealth, always from us to them. How many times have we been here? We’ve lost count. The horror of the fires of Los Angeles inspired deep sadness for the victims and a desperate public desire to help and to know how this came to be. Fire control has been a priority of civilized living since the ancient world. How could history’s richest and most highly educated population areas have failed so completely and so miserably? We can count the ways: 1. Fire control officials and leadership were mostly DEI hires, people put there not due to knowledge or experience but demographic choices. Box-checking for virtue signaling. In their earlier interviews, they spoke mostly about intersectionality, not fire control. That’s how crazy this ideology has become. Not even the imminent threat of death by fire could shake woke towns and cities from prioritizing postmodern obsessions over race, gender, and sexual identity. 2. There is a huge shortage of actual fire control workers, mostly due to vaccine mandates that caused thousands of people to leave the profession entirely. This not only weakened firefighting forces but health care and transportation workforces too, displacing multitudes from jobs they love to something else. This is another point that everyone knows but the corporate media is afraid to admit. They ended up with a firefighting force dominated by compliant supplicants. 3. The empty fire hydrants (they were just there for the designer dogs to use on walks) and water shortages shocked everyone. Upon closer examination, the governor of the state had made videos already about dismantling dams that provide city water so that fish could live a happier life. There was no drought to scapegoat either: rainfall had been at normal or above-normal levels. Meanwhile, mission-critical reservoirs were drained for maintenance, closed for the season of high winds when the water is most needed. 4. Officials in California have long restricted controlled burning, which is absolutely essential for fire control. Otherwise nature creates a tinderbox. One never worries about this in a state of nature: fires come and go but once you build and civilize, you need some other plan besides issuing a fatwa on all burning forever. California residents can tell you stories: property owners can hardly get permission to remove a felled tree. 5. Fire insurance premiums had been controlled in their pricing by the government, driving out many insurance companies and leaving homeowners in a lurch. It’s been known for thousands of years that price control leads to shortages. Leave it to the wealthiest and most educated cohorts to imagine that they are smarter than the whole of human history. As a result, taxpayers are going to foot the rebuilding bill. The list stops there but we could probably add a zero and not get to the end of the outrages.  (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images) I offer you a news item from March 18, 2022, in which an LA County fire official bragged about sending firefighting equipment to Ukraine. “While the L.A. County Fire Department has sent donations for tsunamis, hurricanes and other disasters, Chief Daryl Osby believes this is the first time the department has sent donations to a country in times of war. “We are extremely proud to help our brothers and sister firefighters in Ukraine …” Then you have the looting problem, which until recently was mostly legal in California (Proposition 47, passed in 2014). The governor actually opposed the repeal of the law that forgave thefts of less than $950. The criminals did not get the message and took advantage, creating a hellscape of stealing anything not burning amidst an inferno of destruction. That only scratches the surface of the particular problems of a larger one, which can be summarized by the ideological penchant to live in a dream world. This is the essence of the dominant tendency of California’s political leadership. They have come to believe that they can create any reality they want by their own imaginings, never having to defer to forces of nature, human experience, or economic realities. Anything that contradicts the fantasy is dubbed “misinformation.” And sure enough, even with fires raging and people dying, California officials have taken the time to rage against Alex Jones and whatever random X accounts for supposed inaccuracies on the conditions there. They have spent more time fighting free speech than raging fires. If we thought the out-migration from California was high before, we haven’t begun to see what this latest calamity will bring. Anyone who can will escape. It is now obvious that the ruling elite in the state is nowhere near prepared to deal with any real crisis, and, moreover, many of the crises are created by the elite themselves, from water shortages to electricity rationing to impossible home prices. Have you ever tried to build a home in California? It’s just short of impossible. I spent some time looking through past, present, and future laws concerning residential building in California. It’s completely mind-boggling. The Soviets had fewer laws concerning grain production. It’s hard to imagine the teams of lawyers one would need just put up one structure. Most of the tens of thousands of homes that were destroyed long predated this insane regulatory machinery. They could not and would not exist today. They were owned by old money, for the most part, and those same owners could never get into the wildly inflated market today. There is simply no way to rebuild them under the current thicket of laws. It’s the California regulatory code that should have gone up in flames, every rule and regulation imposed for decades, probably since the Second World War. Otherwise we are going to end up with a tax-funded, big-developer bonanza of huge housing structures like we saw in Eastern Europe when socialism was the rage. The masters of concrete will collaborate with government to move billions from the people to the elites, resulting in structures in which no one would ever want to live. The combination of folly, tragedy, and suffering is painful to watch. Here we have a state with beauty like few places in the world and weather to match. It’s hard to imagine a set of conditions that would make such a place unlivable. Somehow, the educated and wealthy elite of this coastal utopia managed to do it. It now occupies the ignoble status of history’s exhibit A of how bad decision-making, messed up priorities, the exaltation of incompetence, high taxation, hyperregulation, and rule by woke bureaucracy end up creating apocalypse. Many of us have wondered for years what it will take for the media and Hollywood elite to become aware of the errors of their thinking and their ways. One suspects that this might finally be the moment. When you see a parade of know-nothings giving press conferences with no content, and leaders running for cover in the face of unspeakable calamity, it is highly likely that change follows. All of which gets us to the key lesson of the last five or so years. These debates over freedom, property rights, rule of law, and the liberty of the citizens are not merely intellectual parlor games. They are not just for faculty lounges and dorm rooms. They are not merely for entertainment on social-media groups and debate societies. We are literally faced with a choice of life or death, not only of ourselves and those we love but civilization itself.Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. |
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