I think I have a concordance with Dan Walters about something. I know! How’d THAT happen?
So Dan recently stated (May 24), “In some high-cost counties, California’s housing department considers adults making more than $100,000 a year to be poor in terms of qualifying for housing assistance. Being poor from an income standpoint has another aspect that hasn’t gotten as much attention — the even starker stratification of Californians by wealth.”
That is the predictable result of precisely what vigorous capitalism is intended to resolve to.
I agree with his statement. It aligns with a statement I made about the relative poverty experiences among states, when I compared West Virginia to California in a letter dated April 26.
California suffers the highest rate of poverty. Yet it also managed to escalate in worldwide GDP to rise from No. 10 in 2005 to No. 4 by recently surpassing Japan. California also does more than any other state to address the downsides of capitalism. It can afford to. Isn’t that the best central solution between raw anarchic capitalism and state-regulated resolutions to capitalism’s downsides?
California achieves this while conservative tax cheats, who can clearly afford it, who are directly dependent upon state and local agencies in California for their livelihood, register their vehicles in other states and never register them in California. That is a petty and low parasitic state to descend to.
California does actively support its poor, to the chagrin of many/most conservatives, and yet conservative counties benefit more from California’s largess. Are locals hating on their poor conservative brethren elsewhere in the state?
West Virginia, a conservative-run state, is actively hating on its poor. A recent article at westvirginiawatch.com describes the way conservatives want the poor to earn their meager existence. You can read it all here: westvirginiawatch.com/2025/02/25/the-west-virginia-legislatures-continued-war-on-the-poor.
West Virginia is taking a multipronged approach to incise the conditions of its poor by reducing public provisioning in schooling, hunger, homelessness, etc. even as the numbers of its poor are increasing. It also doesn’t help that the underclass there will likely grow at a higher rate because of its policies against unwanted pregnancies.
It reminds me of the line in “Tombstone” where Doc Holliday informs Wyatt Earp that Johnny Ringo does the evil he does because he wants revenge.
When Wyatt asks, revenge, “For what?” Doc answers, “For being born.”
Having temporary concord with Dan is tenuous since I can see the benefits that California has in its policies. Dan wants to blame politicians for a natural state of human civilization. He seems unable to make constructive comparisons among alternatives.
A wise senior coworker once advised me: “We are here to try to solve problems, and once we solve a problem, we consider how we can do it better, and then we go on to improve that, or maybe on to some other problem … and on and on it goes, until we both die trying.”
Civilization is a never resolved, current, temporary, median solution; it is suboptimal because it can always be improved: by those seeking greater existence.
West Virginia, unlike California. coldly imposes an earlier death and unnecessary suffering upon its subjects. I feel free to judge that as patently wrong: it is a poorly managed, retrograde incivility.
An old adage of engineering and economics goes like this: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Dan should consider that when he cannot imagine the California model as anything but a political talking point.
Christopher Lucero
Saugus
