Oh, how true. This is one of the many reasons that Californians and their businesses are fleeing the state in droves and U-Hauls.*

“As a geopolitical going concern, its days are decidedly numbered. So are those of the entire Han ethnicity for that matter. The PRC will fall to pieces well before its notional centennial in 2049. The Han, as a consequential part of the world’s population, will have all but disappeared by the end of the current century.”

the PRC decided to slow its population explosion (population bomb, a la Paul Ehrlich) by restricting families to one child. Since a son is the desired child in China, the result is that two generations (1979 to 2015) are heavy with men and boys. They are growing up to find that there are not enough women to marry. Rather than create a population of half that in 1980, they realized that the birthrate decreased too much with too few women. The birthrate has now fallen to that of the death rate, which may be what they wanted, but as the monosex generations reach reproductive age, now the birthrate is decreasing precipitously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg

Population replacement rates can be measured by births per woman, but this does not work so well in China, as the number of women is decreasing rapidly. How China will recover from this is a mystery, but it is likely to have a significantly lower population two generations from now.

Huh. California is losing its population from piss-poor governance, and China is losing its population from piss-poor governance. The main similarity seems to be top-down centralized-control marxism.

So, what does this have to do with the price of rice in China? I mean, what does this have to do with the navigation of a Neutron to Wallops?

Oh, right. Top-down centralized-control marxism. It seems to be spreading throughout the U.S., too.
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* Anyone who wants to move into California might be able to get paid to haul a U-Haul into CA. I’m kind of kidding, but it is much more expensive to rent one out and much cheaper to rent one into CA. U-Hauls must be being brought back to California by the trainload.

Progressivism, indeed, does not mean what it used to. FDR’s programs were aimed at employing the able-bodied – mostly men – and putting them to work building public infrastructure. My own unfortunate state of long-time residence, California, is still living off the legacy infrastructure built by FDR in the 1930s and Gov. Pat Brown in the 1950s. The CA population having more than doubled since those times, of course, the strain on that legacy infrastructure is everywhere apparent. And, rather than build useful new infrastructure, the one-party CA state gov’t. has been trying – and conspicuously failing – to build useless new infrastructure in the form of a “high-speed rail” line from L.A. to S.F.

Today’s progressives, of course, don’t really want to build new infrastructure or even maintain what was formerly built. All they want to do is employ ever more office-dwelling bureaucrats whose jobs are to keep anyone else from building anything.

All US Western land was government-owned by default as what are now states started out as federal territories. The rail barons didn’t buy land, it was given to them – on each side of rail rights of way – in exchange for the construction of said railroads. That contributed, marginally, to privatizing some formerly government land in the West, but there were never enough rail lines built to make much of a dent in the overwhelming government ownership. The land grants were structured such that the granted land would return to government control if the railroad rights of way ceased being used. So much of the early railroad land grants – particularly for mining-related narrow-gauge lines – has long since reverted to government control as mines played out and erstwhile boom towns became ghost towns.

The Chinese – specifically, the PRC – have been all sorts of stupid in ways different than anything done in the US. The PRC, for example, gave local governments almost no way to raise revenue except by selling land to housing developers. This worked for awhile, but the PRC housing market is now hugely overbuilt, especially as the population is aging and shrinking. The housing constructors are all going broke and empty units that are unsold and unoccupied generate no revenue that localities could tax even were they allowed to by Beijing – which they are not. The PRC is an enormous mess in almost every way, but especially demographically and financially. As a geopolitical going concern, its days are decidedly numbered. So are those of the entire Han ethnicity for that matter. The PRC will fall to pieces well before its notional centennial in 2049. The Han, as a consequential part of the world’s population, will have all but disappeared by the end of the current century.

The problem with a philosophy of “a place for everything and everything in its place” is the assumption that there is any obvious and broad-scale agreement about just where the “places” for “everything” should be. There isn’t.

Progressivism doesn’t mean what it used to.

In FDR’s era–progressivism was “chop this down, dig that up–dredge this river–drain that swamp.”

The worst you could say about FDR men is that they wanted the poor in the Third World to live as we did.

Greens, on the other hand–wanted is to live like the Third World.

The environmental movement has always been anti-human.

Ironically, it was railroad barons who bought so much of the West who converted land to federal holdings. They helped keep America resource poor.

I guarantee you China will never be as dumb.

I consider myself a Neo-Victorian. A place for everything—and everything in its place. The whole public/private thing bores me.

What I care about is what is good for America at large–not ideological purists.

They bore me.

I think the environmental movement is a potential evil worse than Nazism and Communism combined.

Pretty much. Dredging an extant channel a bit deeper should be a no-brainer in any rational universe but that is not, sadly, the one in which we live.

In pre-EPA times, my hometown put a dredge at the then-lakeshore to work for about a year to create about a square mile of new land for a municipal park and a bathing beach. The new land was at a lower elevation than the natural land so there was a 50% grade connecting them that turned out to be ideal for sledding and tobogganing during snow season. We child daredevils would ride our bikes down the slope the rest of the year. There were some long angled sidewalks connecting the higher and lower ground that made excellent high-speed skateboard runs.

Had the EPA existed back then, I have no doubt my hometown city government would not even have been able to afford to do the paperwork associated with such a project, nor fend off the inevitable nuisance lawsuits, never mind actually carrying it out. My childhood would have been appreciably less enjoyable.

I wonder, sometimes, just how many comparable projects have been stillborn over the last half-century-plus of federal Karen-ism writ large. I also wonder whether or not this may have something to do with what strikes me as the generally greater crankiness of youngsters these days compared to the norms of my long-fled youth.