Reason magazine has been doing yeoman's work documenting how government policy has turned the Central Valley of California, the most productive agricultural area in the world into an economic basket case.
California's Central Valley is a 450 mile long stretch of flat and fertile land that produces much of the food that we enjoy every day. But the people in small towns like Mendota (the cantaloupe capital of the world) are suffering these days, in part due to two federal policies.I have traditionally been an "open borders" libertarian, but that is changing as I look at the concentrated poverty of the Valley. Billions of dollars are syphoned out of the Valley in order to support the kleptocracy in Mexico. That makes the Valley poorer and doesn't help the Mexicans.
In order to protect a threatened fish species called the Delta Smelt, much of the water that used to be pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley is now allowed to flow into the ocean. The result is predictable: hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land lies fallow and tens of thousands of jobs have been lost. In Mendota, the unemployment rate is over 40% and food lines are the norm.
But people going hungry in a region dominated by agriculture is only one of the contradictions in the Central Valley.
Nearly all the valley's farm workers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America, and many of them are undocumented. These people are crucial to the valley's economy, but they're breaking the law according to the federal government.
As for the Delta smelt....well, it's time for them to take on on the chin for the team.
Or we could use the billions in money that was wasted on make-work and actually start builing infrastructure to support the population.
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