Brendan Kirby writes on Lifezette.com that California's progrogressives' project to secede from the union, a.k.a. "CalExit" has suffered a setback since one of its leaders has decided to move permanently to Russia. Oh, and that California leaving the Union would be a huge boost to Republican domination of the 49 remaining United States of America (just do the Electoral College math; take away California's 55 Democrat electoral votes, and the country as a whole swings to the right of Calvin Coolidge).

He leaves out that the San Francisco 49ers would have to move out, say, to Kremling, Colorado, in order that their name accurately represent the remaining states of the union and become our citizens' new moniker.

As much as a CalExit would create great hardships for my family (turning us into refugees) as well as for hundreds of my closest friends in the most dynamic if besieged conservative intellectual community in the country, part of me can't help but goad them on. Go for it! Make our day! Take your precious Marxist-progressive race-class-gender-Gaea identity experiment to its logical conclusion so that the world can see once for all what happens to a prosperous country when it embraces this philosophy with zero possibility of effective dissent. Let's see how long it takes for California to turn into Argentina or Venezuela, once great and aspiring players on the world stage.

Liberals boast about California reclaiming its ranking as the seventh largest economy in the world among nation states. But even if true, it is a hollow shell, a steroid-bulked-up muscle mass over an osteoporosis-ravaged skeleton. What does the California economy have going for it? A handful of aging powerhouses of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both are showing signs of arthritic middle age.

The dynamism and innovation of the Dot-Com boom era is gone; IPOs are a faint echo of what they once were, thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and a hundred other regulations to save us from ourselves and from any future Steve Jobses (see George Gilder's The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does). The twenty- and forty-year-old goliaths that dominate the San Francisco-San Jose corridor jockey for market share and dazzle us (not!) with increasingly trivial social media and music video game trinkets, while actual business and engineering productivity tools are slower (on hardware that is ten times "cheaper" and "faster"), buggier, more difficult to own (or "rent") less intuitive and more poorly supported than they were ten years ago. In short, Silicon Valley sucks. Apple can't even find anything worthwhile to do with 250 thousand million -- a quarter trillion -- dollars in cash.
Which leaves Hollywood. Leftist directors, stars and other power brokers already live in an echo chamber that holds half of rest of the country -- its market -- in utter contempt. How much more are they going to be able to sell their toxic products to people that they hate, once they've purged their environment once for all of all vestiges of traditional American values? Do they think that the 49ers are going to tune in with baited breath to the Academy Awards show, broadcast from a foreign country?

California was once a mecca of the defense and energy (petroleum and nuclear power) industries, but the progressive leadership has renounced, repudiated, and evicted these as anathema to their peace-loving, Earth-worshipping environmental and climate goals. Everything progressives want to do, like build a 21st-century Wonder of the World bullet train and urban mass transit systems that are so convenient and efficient that no one would want to own a private automobile anymore, requires energy, and lots of it; but the California progressives can't bring themselves to permit any energy-producing initiative that doesn't consume more energy than it produces. Regular gasoline rockets past $3.50 per gallon, twice what neighboring Arizonans pay for it. A boon to the poor, for whom they have such contempt, I mean concern? This is unsustainable.

The pesky obstacles to the California progressives' project in California, of course, have been the last few pockets of conservatives, Republicans, and businesses that haven't already fled to Texas, Arizona, or the most desolate Nevada side of Death Valley in search of a more hospitable tax and regulatory habitat. The leftists' answer to that challenge has been to expand the rolls of dependency (on them) as much as possible among their captive mascot demographics as may be peeled off from those who otherwise might have embraced American freedom, responsibility, prosperity, and self-respect, and to massively import the rest from Mexico, Central America, and the Middle East. No cultural background or degree of criminality is too poisonous for the comfortable gated-community progressives, no matter how misogynistic or gay-murdering, as long as it has zero investment in American Constitutional, Judeo-Christian, limited-government, and private property-rights principles; as long as it may be counted on to vote 80% Democratic party line from here to Kingdom Come.

This is also unsustainable, economically and socially. The drain on the public treasury combined with the weakened productive base should be obvious. Some of the members of long-established American citizen minority communities who had aspirations of achieving the American Dream -- blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, LGTBQuertys -- might begin to notice that the Democratic Party has sold them down the river for a pottage. White Christian heterosexual Protestant multigenerational citizens might be the progressives' primary target for extermination (metaphorically -- no letters, please), but plenty of other dolphins will get caught in the progressive's tuna net.

In other words, California has existentially threatening problems of its own progressive making whether it secedes or not. Secession might be the best way to enable the inevitable consequences of the elites' decisions to run their course to their inevitable conclusion. Then in a generation or less, Californians will either beg the free and prosperous 49 United States of America to be let back in, or they will join Sweden, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire as a once-great-and-now-for-millennia-destined-to-be-terminally-ill shadow of its former self.

I will mourn the beautiful country in which I was born and raised, and lived all but four of the years of my life. But if it is inevitable, let it come with swiftness and clarity, so that none may ever be able to say again without embarrassment that "Socialism is the best system, it just hasn't really been tried yet".

Howard Hyde is editor of www.CitizenEcon.com, Fellow of the American Freedom Alliance and author of the books Pull the Plug on Obamacare (2013) and Escape From Berkeley: An EX liberal progressive socialist embraces America (and doesn't apologize) (2016)