Red vs Blue

From Michael Walsh in the Corner.

Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds links to a typically perceptive column by Joel Kotkin about the explosive economic growth in regions dominated by red states, which are now attracting migrants from the failed blue states, and then offers this observation:

The danger, of course, is that these immigrants will bring the same toxic blue-state politics with them that produced the disasters they’re fleeing. Someone should set up a sort of Welcome Wagon — an education program for these immigrants that will encourage them to appreciate the policy and cultural differences that led to the prosperity that’s attracted them.

A good place to start might be by withholding the vote in state and local elections for a reasonable period — say, 50 years — until they get acclimated to their new environments. When I was growing up in southern California in the fifties and early sixties, the Golden State was conservative, pragmatic, and can-do, a place where nothing was impossible and the state leaders felt it their duty to take what God had given them and work to improve it.

Today, the place is a high-tax, high-regulation bankrupt mess administered by a Sacramento satrapy infested with leftist crackpots bent on destroying as much of California’s prosperity as they can while living a fantasy existence in their protected enclaves. As Kotkin notes of the “red state growth corridors”:

Historically, these regions were little more than resource colonies or low-wage labor sites for richer, more technically advanced areas. By promoting policies that encourage enterprise and spark economic growth, they’re catching up.

Over the Left’s dead body: now they’re trying to do the same thing they did to California to places like Texas, in part to break the Lone Star State’s electoral-votes bloc at the national political level, but also just for the hell of it. They’re like the aliens inIndependence Day, moving from planet to planet, sucking the life out of one world and then moving on to the next. That they’re leaving behind the hollowed-out corpses of once-great places like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York is of no moment to them. There’s only one thing they want conservative America to do: