Statist debt Ponzi collapsing in slo mo.

The recent news from California is that they have to let prisoners go.  Why?  Because they can no longer afford to continue expanding the penal system and so overcrowding has gotten critical.  In other words, their debt Ponzi is collapsing and along with it the statist quo.  The statists love prisons.  They love overbearing laws.  They love control.  They love jailing people for nonviolent non-dangerous drug infractions.  But they don't want to pay for the prisons themselves.  Like all statist programs, including welfare, they want someone else to pay for it.  They claim they are doing it for compassion and for order and for civility but the truth is that they are doing it so they can turn a tidy profit administering the whole thing.  When it finally collapses there will be far less compassion and order than there would have been without the statist bubble.  All of their efforts to control people will end up being a net negative.  All they ever wanted was power over their fellow man even though they themselves don't produce anything useful.  They have been financing this power grab for many years with massive debt but now they have entered the end game of the debt Ponzi.  When the Ponzi collapses their beloved power will swirl the bowl too.

The prisons are just the start of it.  Welfare will collapse, housing subsidies will collapse.  Everything that they have bought with their ridiculous debt will collapse.  Infrastructure will collapse too.  California is Greece.  Strike that.  California is more like Spain or Italy both in economic size and in likelihood of going bankrupt.  Over the next decade, California will just get older and grittier.  California will see riots before this bust is over.  The easy, credit driven funny money is drying up.  California is raising taxes to try to fill the gap but it is causing businesses to flee.  California government is chasing out many of the top producers and as a result the burden on those remaining just continues to ratchet up, inch by inch.  It reminds me of Floridians who stayed in their condos while many of their neighbors left.  The result was a dramatic rise in the monthly condo fees as constant fees were borne by fewer shoulders. Con men and willing patsies at every level have run California into the ground and I fear that an eventual massive collapse is inevitable for the state at some point, probably within a decade.  Not that everyone else will have it very much better but California bubbled up higher and thus has much further to fall as the Grand Illusion - the American Dream - evaporates back into the ether right along with all the debt that it used to pump itself up in the first place.

The smart people are those who see it coming and who leave before it gets real bad.  The smart ones hear the economic tsunami sirens wailing and are running like Hell for higher ground.  The people who sold Florida condos for a small loss ended up saving themselves from total loss by leaving early.  Those who remained have properties whose condo fees are as much as the mortgage in some cases.  This makes their property un-sellable.  Of course, condo fees are a rip off and always have been.   Who in their right mind would pay $350-$500 or more per month so that someone can mow the lawn and trim the hedges and clean the pool?  If I have a lawn and a hedge and a pool it certainly doesn't cost me $350-$500 per month to maintain them and you would think that each condo owner's piece of the hedge and pool is quite small when amortized over all the residents.  Obviously some con man is making a profit off the condo fees - money for nothing.  When the credit was flowing nobody cared.  Now that the credit is retracting, everyone will care a lot.