I guess I’m a little older than most of the folks pushing the “California is dying” line, because it seems like I’ve been reading the same California Exodus stuff for as long as I can remember. And I guess a certain amount of it makes sense—if living in a place becomes sufficiently onerous to people who have the means to move, and there are other places which are competitive, you’re going to see some movement. This seems to be more cyclical than strictly ideological to me, but who knows. To me, pushing the “red states vs blue states” dynamic seems silly.
There are some considerable, tangible benefits moving from a high-tax, big-gummint “blue state” to somewhere else. One class of emigrants makes that move for purely high-end economic reasons, some make it for purely practical reasons—because that’s where the jobs are in the industry they’re working. Here in SC, locals have bitched for a couple of decades about Ohio transplants. Looking at it from another perspective, our cheap labor and anti-union politics has exploited brain-drain from big Rust Belt public universities and made my community a net receiver of those net-loser Rust Belt states. But to cast that as “blue state bad, red state good” is silly. People come here—after getting superior public educations in their native places—because it’s relatively cheap and the jobs are here. It’s, for lack of a better term, market forces. Same throughout the Sun Belt.
But a funny thing happens when those populations start to shift. People start to say “why are the roads so bad here, why are there no sidewalks, why do the schools suck, why do the parks suck, why is the public infrastructure so bad?” Those questions have already led to significant shifts in local politics. The booming transnational immigrant population—ranging from “higher-skill” tech workers to “lower-skill” support workers, has done the same. Eventually the boom-town dynamic is going to change not only the demographics but also the political economy of the community. Eventually people are going to demand a standard of living that replicates what they’re accustomed to or what they think they deserve. And then, either the community is going to change, or there will be some incremental change over years and then the jobs will disappear to somewhere else where people are cheaper to employ. It’s certainly happened before, right here, when the textile industry which moved here from the NE wholesale, then moved overseas wholesale a few decades later.
If you look at this and say “red state vs. blue state,” I think you’re missing the big picture.
