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POINT OF VIEW - Contemplating this may be too painful, but one must consider the possibility. California and Venezuela share many similar traits in how they are governed. This analogy is not about tanks in the streets or elections canceled tomorrow. It is about governance mechanics, the slow institutional decay that occurs when power concentrates, accountability disappears, and ideology replaces good, services, and common sense.
California today exhibits many of the same structural characteristics that preceded Venezuela’s collapse. Not to the degree, but certainly in direction. For all practical purposes, California operates under a de facto one-party rule, just like a dictatorship. The Governor’s office, the Legislature, the courts, regulatory agencies, public universities, and most major cities are controlled by the same political coalition and the same stinking thinking year after year. Competitive elections, the primary mechanism democracies use to correct failure, have largely vanished.
In Venezuela, independent audits show that in the 2024 election, Maduro fabricated or suppressed 4.7 million votes, turning a landslide 67% defeat into a fraudulent 51% victory. Governor Gavin Newsom has consistently opposed efforts to impose voter ID requirements. His position aligns with broader Democratic arguments that such measures are unnecessary and could harm voter access. This leaves open the possibility that, without ID, thousands or tens of thousands of people may be voting illegally, which, under California rules, is extremely hard to prove. However, this categorical rejection of voter ID is all you need to know about the transparency of California’s elections.
Under Gavin Newsom, policy failures carry no penalty. Housing shortages worsen. Homelessness expands. Infrastructure decays. Energy costs soar. Public safety deteriorates. Yet budgets grow, deficits widen, and leadership remains untouched. This is not accidental. It is the predictable result of a political monopoly. Venezuela followed the same path: when the opposition ceased to matter, the feedback loop died, and the plunder began. California has reached the same stage, and nobody seems to care.
In Venezuela, economic stability depended on loyalty to the ruling network. California’s version is more sophisticated but no less corrosive. If you want predictable income, benefits, and insulation from market realities, you move toward the state: government agencies, public-sector unions, regulatory bodies, and taxpayer-funded NGOs. Advancement within these systems depends less on performance than on ideological alignment and political reliability. In other words, see no evil, hear no evil, and, for God’s sake, don’t criticize.
The private sector, especially small businesses, farmers, and independent producers, are treated as a problem to be managed, fined, and regulated out of business. Why? Because of cow farts and water usage, apparently. Agencies such as the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board, run by appointed climate hysterics, impose ever-expanding mandates while remaining insulated from the economic damage they cause. Those six-figure government salaries and benefits sure are sweet.
The most damning evidence comes from lived experience. Jeff Kazin, former head of trading for Cargill in Venezuela, witnessed how a resource-rich nation destroyed its own food system. Cargill was Venezuela’s leading producer of staples—rice, flour, pasta, and vegetable oil. These are the foundations of social order.
The government accused Cargill of “gouging” the poor and seized a Minute Rice facility at gunpoint. The state never managed to run it. Years later, it was returned stripped of equipment—permanently destroyed. This was not incompetence. It was inevitable.
Price controls, politicized enforcement, and ideological hostility to private production guaranteed failure. This mirrors what California has done to our oil refineries. State-run grocery stores sold food below cost, funded by oil money. Private grocers collapsed. When suppliers were forced to sell at a loss, they went out of business. Dependency replaced production. Hunger followed.
California’s leadership should know this history. It is choosing to repeat it. California is not running out of food. It is running out of producers. Between 2017 and 2022, California lost more than 10 percent of its farms, with closures concentrated among small and mid-sized family operations—the most resilient part of the food system. In the Central Valley, hundreds of thousands of acres of productive farmland have been fallowed, not because the land failed, but because policy made farming irrational.
Water allocations shift arbitrarily within agencies such as the California Department of Water Resources. Environmental rules multiply. CEQA litigation enabled and protected by the Legislature kills projects by delay. Labor mandates rise. Compliance costs explode. Profitability becomes impossible. Fuel becomes scarce and expensive.
Dairy farmers tell the same story. California remains the nation’s largest milk producer by volume, yet over two decades it has lost roughly three-quarters of its family-scale dairies. Consolidation masks fragility until a single shock breaks the system.
Rice, cattle, feed, and food processing follow the same trajectory. Output remains for now. Resilience and diversity do not. Venezuela’s shelves did not empty the day the first plant was seized. They emptied years later, after capacity had already been hollowed out. In Venezuela, the government sold subsidized food to appear compassionate while destroying the private supply chain. California is doing the same thing through overregulation. Nobody is paying attention to the struggles of small farmers.
The state raises the cost of private production through regulation, labor mandates, water restrictions, overregulation of energy suppliers, and litigation. Then it expands subsidized alternatives, food assistance programs, price interventions, and government-favored distributors that cannot exist without permanent taxpayer funding.
Once private capacity disappears, dependence becomes structural. At that point, the state no longer needs producers; it has its dependents. Venezuela rationed U.S. dollars. Only politically connected firms received them. Plants closed simply because raw materials could not be purchased.
California does not ration currency, but it rations permission to operate. Capital is trapped in permitting hell. Projects die under CEQA. Taxes punish reinvestment. Energy costs—driven by mandates from CARB and enforced through utilities regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission—are punitive. The Coastal Commission blocks development, rebuilding, and even desalination plants in a State prone to drought.
Investment leaves first. Then production follows. Food processors relocate to Texas. Dairies move to the Midwest. Growers expand in Mexico. California becomes a consumption state importing essentials it once exported. This is not climate leadership. It is economic self-disarmament. Venezuela’s livestock sector collapsed when farmers could no longer protect animals from theft. Hunger, armed with impunity, ended agriculture.
California is not Venezuela, but it is flirting with the same logic. Rural theft is rising. Property crime is selectively enforced. Vandalism of water infrastructure goes unpunished. Farmers are treated like ecological criminals.
District attorneys in major counties, empowered by laws enacted during Rob Bonta’s tenure in Sacramento and defended by the Governor, have deprioritized enforcement in the name of ideology. Agriculture cannot exist without the rule of law. Pretending otherwise is a fantasy.
One of the least examined parallels with Venezuela is the role of NGOs. In California, billions of taxpayer dollars flow through nonprofits tasked with addressing homelessness, the transition to a clean energy future, healthcare access, and social services. Agencies such as the California Department of Housing and Community Development and the Los Angeles Services Authority disburse funds with minimal no accountability. Outcomes are rarely measured. Failure rarely results in defunding. Instead, budgets grow as problems worsen. It really boggles the mind that NGOs’ CEOs get rich handing out crack pipes and clean syringes under the false pretense of harm reduction.
This is not charity. It is patronage administered through tax-exempt intermediaries.
Venezuela masked its structural insolvency by relying on oil revenue. California masks its impending financial collapse by targeting high-income earners and volatile capital gains taxes. Unfunded pension liabilities, infrastructure backlogs, and long-term healthcare obligations are acknowledged but never confronted. Legislative leaders, including Toni Atkins and Anthony Rendon, prefer denial to reform, confident that someone else will bear the cost once they are conveniently out of office. Denial is politically easy, given the ruling power’s high probability of reelection.
In Venezuela, policy failure was blamed on external enemies. In California, it is blamed on capitalism, climate change, federal constraints, insufficient spending, and Trump. What is never questioned is the governing framework itself. If you are a legislating official, you must never, under penalty of censure and being primaried, consider the 2nd- and 3rd-order effects of your misbegotten laws.
Housing shortages persist despite decades of intervention. Homelessness grows despite record funding. Energy prices soar while grid reliability declines. Yet each failure produces not reassessment but the expansion of the same policies. Each failure is an excuse to raise taxes. Each tax increase means more money in the system to be stolen, looted, and unaccounted for. This is your money!
Perhaps the most dangerous parallel is demographic. Venezuela lost its professionals through emigration. California is losing its middle class through domestic out-migration. Teachers, engineers, skilled tradespeople, farmers, and small business owners are leaving not because they oppose diversity or progress, but because the basic civilizational bargain has collapsed.
At this point, it is accurate to describe California’s leadership as a ruling junta not because it wears uniforms, but because it is insulated, self-reinforcing, blind to the harm it causes, and contemptuous of feedback.
Like Venezuela’s rulers, California’s leadership:
- Blames failure on external forces
- Treats production as morally suspect
- Replaces markets with mandates
- Substitutes subsidies for supply
- Punishes dissent through regulation
- Celebrates virtue while hollowing out capacity
This is not compassion. This is not progressive governance. It is a patronage economy.
California is not Venezuela. But Venezuela did not become what it is overnight. It became Venezuela by destroying food systems, driving out producers, centralizing power, rewarding loyalty over competence, and treating economics as an ideological inconvenience. Once farms close, dairies vanish, processors leave, and supply chains fracture and shut down, rebuilding is slow, expensive, and politically inconvenient. These systems are fragile. They do not survive arrogance.
California still has time to course correct. California’s leaders believe there is nothing to worry about and that there are no limits to how far things can be pushed. Newsom, the good hair, and his fellow courtiers are behaving exactly like Marie Antoinette, without the powdered wigs.
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
