The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution than has made them so fabulously rich.
… In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes.
If nothing else, the era of Average is Over produces a lot of intense rhetoric. Although, I have to say, Kotkin’s rhetoric is not too far removed from my jobs speech (which has an Average is Over theme to it).
Joel Kotkin has no business lecturing anyone about the baleful effects of regulation. He’s perfectly happy to support extensive regulation to promote his preferred lifestyle, the cost of which is borne in massively higher housing costs as the extensive research of Edward Glaeser, among others, has shown. These costs matter much more for the middle class that whatever fantasy Kotkin is spinning on about here about environmental regulations.
This is a pitch perfect example of what Tyler Cowen would call mood affiliation. Talk about environmentalists, “oligarchs”, and whatever enemies you want, and maybe no one will notice that you’re the one who supports the laws which truly are damaging the middle class.