The plight of California, the once and former Golden State, has been the topic of many a blog post – so here’s another one.  This just in from the always-worth-reading Dr. Victor Davis Hanson:  Let’s Save California Now!

It’s a brilliant piece of political satire.  Dr. Hanson is always excellent reading, but he’s outdone himself on this list of “solutions” for California.  Two examples stand out:

5. The California Firearms Safety Act

The “No Guns for Grandees Act” would forbid private security details to be armed with handguns or semi-automatic long guns. It would allow private security personnel to be armed only with paintball, BB or pellet guns. Aim: To prevent unnecessary armed deterrence by private security units in the hire of the affluent.

11. The Petroleum Fair Use Act

The “Pump What You Use Act” establishes a state board to ensure

California gasoline consumption matches state oil production. It collates daily refining outputs of California-produced petroleum with daily state sales of gasoline. It cuts off all daily state sales of gasoline that exceed daily state refinery production of state-produced petroleum. Aim: To ensure that Californians only consume the gasoline they produce and thereby do not promote a larger carbon footprint by subsidizing out-of-state oil production not overseen by California resource legislation.

This piece, of course, is facetious.  But where Californey politics are concerned, one should be cautious; there is no idea so nutty that some California pol might not find it to be a good idea and attempt to introduce a bill.   Hoisting California voters on their own petards, as most of these proposals attempt to do, is entertaining.  But there is an enormous disconnect in the Golden State between the wealthy coastal elites and, well, the rest of the state; it is that disconnect that Dr. Hanson attempts to address here.

There have been numerous proposals to break California up in to as many as five separate states.  Given the size of the state, the size of its population, and the disparity of social, economic and cultural attitudes of its residents, maybe a breakup wouldn’t be a bad idea.  At the very least, a separation of the LA and San Francisco metropolitan areas from the rest of the state would contain most of the California legislature’s more extreme nuttiness.

California is not, after all, too big to fail.  Nothing is.