Don’t let the title frighten you; we’re just talking about California. Excerpt:
Like ancient Egypt, California is beset by plagues, most of them self-inflicted — homicidal summer wildfires, a crime spike, electricity blackouts, the end of the internal-combustion engine, failing public schools, water shortages, highest-in-the-nation taxes, a COVID response that gutted the economy and did little to contain the virus, metastasizing homelessness, critical race theory, official confusion about obvious differences between men and women, Governor Gavin Newsom, and, of course, University of Southern California head football coach Clay Helton. With all that, it’s hardly surprising that many Californians are fleeing for other states, crossing the Colorado River in a kind of exodus that’s also remindful of Bible stories: For the first time since William McKinley captured the White House, the state’s population is falling.
Even so, it’s a little surprising that the next plague may well be hunger — not actual corpses-in-the-streets famine, but a bacon shortage in which some of the living may envy the dead.
And not just bacon. State regulators are set to block, in January, the sale of chickens, veal calves, and pigs raised in conditions prohibited under 2018’s Proposition 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. You can’t blame this on Newsom or the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority. Instead, blame California voters, two-thirds of whom believed that they could suspend the laws of economics and that nobody would have to pay for it.
They were wrong, of course. The bacon shortage — newspaper shorthand for a shortage of all pork products — may be unintended, but it was utterly predictable. Pork producers in Iowa and other midwestern states, and poor people all over the U.S., will pay more so that most California voters can feel less bad about themselves.
I’m not sure how much pork prices will be affected in the balance of the lower 48, where voters aren’t quite so stupid. Granted up here in the Great Land plenty of stuff is already more expensive than in the 48, due to the need to ship things up here, although there is some truck farming, poultry, beef and pork grown here, mostly in the Matanuska Valley. But, I digress.
It’s the idea that California voters would even approve this at all that I find somewhat baffling. Then again, this is a state that saw fit to elect walking hairpiece Gavin Newsom as Governor, and sent Heels-Up Harris to the Senate. So, who knows?
All I know is this: Bacon should not be underestimated. It’s meat candy. It’s a gift pigs give us when we’re good. And if California, in yet another display of lunacy, wants to deprive the electorate of bacon – well, then, all I can say is “more for the rest of us!”
