Why California Is so Expensive: Victor Davis Hanson

California undeniably ranks among the nation’s highest-cost places to live. The state’s cost of living in 2023 is nearly 40 percent higher than the average nationwide, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center, a division of the Missouri Department of Economic Development, which also provides analysis on the economy nationwide. According to the researchers, housing was 92 percent higher compared to the national average, while both utilities and transportation were over 20 percent more expensive. As such, a well-known scholar suggests the state’s gradual shift from the “land of opportunity.” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said on a recent episode of EpochTV’s “California Insider” that the state’s high cost of living stems from what he called a “utopian ideology” spawned by rapid industrial growth and an increasingly polarized social composition of extreme rich and extreme poor....