The clearest possible illustration.

Why is it that nominally well-educated people can’t look at a set of observable facts and come to a logical conclusion? Observable facts are all around us. Yet logical conclusions remain elusive.

A clear example of observable facts can be seen in the influx of Californians moving to Texas. By the thousands lifelong citizens of the Golden State are coming to the Lone Star State. If you doubt me, drive around Dallas, and look at the volume of high-rise residential construction – both condos and apartments.

People from California aren’t coming to Texas for the pleasant summertime weather. They’re coming because of the massive dysfunction of California brought about by decades of leftist policy.

I’m bringing up California because the governor’s race in that state is in the news. Because of the unusual way that California conducts its primary elections – and I won’t spend the time to explain it here – a Republican has a plausible shot at becoming the next governor, replacing far-left pretty boy Gavin Newsom. (Newsom, for his part, wants to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2028.)

California, once the most beautiful, most prosperous, and most envied state in the Union, is a hot mess. Taxes in California are among the highest in the nation, yet the state’s roads are crumbling, its schools are failing, its big cities are degenerating, the state is essentially insolvent, the middle class is heading for the exits and an astonishing number of those left behind are living on the streets.

Astonishing indeed. California is the homeless capital of the nation. Nearly a quarter of all the homeless people in the entire country live there. Compare to Texas, the next most populous state, where fewer than four percent of the nation’s homeless live.

And as much as Democrats will try to make it so, none of this is Donald Trump’s fault. Trump has held one elective office two times for a combined total of just over five years. The last time that Republicans had a majority in the California legislature was 1970. The last Republican governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who left office in 2011 (and barely counts as a Republican anyway).

Decades of Democrat policies have brought once great California to the brink and yet no Democrat and no one in the leftist dominated media ever connects the dots.

When Lyndon Johnson began promoting his liberal Great Society programs in the mid 1960s, the debate was largely abstract. Big-government welfare at such scale had never been tried before.

But 60 years later we have hard data. The Great Society was a failure. The poverty rate of 2026 is little changed from the poverty rate of 1966. Yet poverty today is, perversely, even more deeply entrenched than it was when the Great Society launched.

Six decades of experience now shows that liberal, big-government programs not only don’t solve problems, they most often make the problems they set out to solve worse.

California – once the wealthiest, most envied state in the Union – is the clearest possible illustration.