Madness costs. Just watch.

We no longer have politics. The overflowing bucket of psychopathology that passes for the Democratic Party has gone entirely insane, and it's taking us all with it. If you haven’t had enough of lawfare and Russian collusion and transgender children, great news: You’ll get plenty more, louder and crazier.

It isn’t working. A failure cascade is beginning — everywhere. The blue model is dying, hard and fast, and it deserves to die. It will not be saved. And the cause of death is becoming very clear.

If you govern like Jacobin lunatics, you destroy everything you touch.

The death cycle has two sides.

Start with the decline side, the effect. In January, California faced a budget deficit estimated at $58 billion. A month later, that deficit is now estimated at $73 billion. There are several months to go in the state’s budget cycle, so no one knows what that final deficit number will turn out to be. I endorse the sentiment that Governor Gavin Newsom (D) “would run a child’s lemonade stand into the ground.” The state’s infrastructure is already in appalling condition, so sharp reductions in state spending will get interesting in a hurry. Invest in Los Angeles tire shops.

The other side is the origin of the implosion. California’s decline is caused by a political process that doesn’t notice basic questions of governance because politicians are too busy preening and performing about social justice nonsense.

California politicians spend their time on things like reparations and an endless stream of disgraceful anti-parent bills; last year, discussing a bill to penalize parents for failing to honor a child’s gender transition choices, one of the few Republican legislators in Sacramento warned parents to escape the state and “move to America.”

Meanwhile, the California attorney general is suing a school district to prevent it from implementing a parental notification policy, fighting for secret sexual discussions on K-12 campuses.

And so California has lost more than 800,000 residents in three years, as people flee to sanity. They are, in fact, moving to America, and businesses are leaving with them. So Democrats keep winning elections in California, and they keep moving harder and harder to the left, and taxpayers are racing for the exits. And now: a $58 billion deficit that quickly turns into a $73 billion deficit.

What voting won’t stop, capital flight will.

That bill is coming due in a hurry. The problem with socialism, Margaret Thatcher said, is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. The problem with culturally insane anti-family woke socialism is that it strips out the “eventually.” If you govern like Jacobin lunatics, you destroy everything you touch.

Watch this repulsive display, as Newsom signs a bill into law to guarantee children access to sexual materials in schools. They call it an “anti-book-ban” law, and nowhere near enough actual taxpayers are dumb enough to fall for it. Sexualize childhood, lose families to other states. Hubris invites nemesis. Arrogant scumbags destroy themselves and take institutions with them.

New York is experiencing the same thing — and is about to experience the hell out of it. Manhattan juries and creepy Tammany-redux machine judges have proved to be extremely willing to punish Donald Trump for anything that shows up in their courtroom. Judge Arthur Engoron has imposed penalties that threaten to crush the Trump family business, with a fine north of $350 million and a years-long ban on doing business in the state. Attorney General Letitia James quickly followed up with a threat to start seizing Trump assets, including Trump Tower.

But that punishment follows a supposed act of fraud with no victims, as willing lenders told the court that they were happy to make the fully repaid loans that allegedly constituted fraudulent acts. Businesses all over the state, and investors all over the world, quickly noticed the implications: Fraud is whatever the state says, whenever state officials don’t like your politics.

“They still have no idea what they’ve done," investor Tony Seruga wrote. “What is that sucking sound? I do not want to cause any additional anxiety for my partners but our family office is working on pulling $2B out of NYC as cleanly as possible. A number of pension funds that have already abandoned ESG are now divesting from NY real estate.”

New York, already facing considerable capital flight, has communicated to corporations that their assets aren’t safe. Some of them will act on that observation.

Stability draws businesses and taxpayers. A steady and not noticeably insane politics builds; a punitive and socially unstable politics destroys. Forget for the moment about how people vote and how they speak, and forget about how officials perform for the cameras. Start thinking about assets. They'll tell you what course corrections have to happen.

Democrats are going to get crazier, and they’re going to do it in a hurry. And the costs will become clear with equal speed.