California has long been associated with the American dream.

But these days, the liberal state is turning into more of a nightmare.

If you listen to progressives, the Golden State should be an absolute paradise by now.

After all, California has become a sort of test-bed for liberal policies: Strict gun control, sanctuary cities, broad welfare and all the rest.

But has it worked? Not quite.





Actually, all that leftism seems to have had the opposite of the intended result.

California’s shameful record as the state with the highest poverty rate in America should have been the first clue, but that’s just the beginning.

A longtime United Nations envoy paid a visit to the “liberal paradise” of San Francisco, and what she found was staggering.

Leilani Farha was left comparing the California city to the slums of India, in what is yet another signal that the leftist experiment has failed.

“When Leilani Farha paid a visit to San Francisco in January, she knew the grim reputation of the city’s homeless encampments. In her four years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Farha has visited the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta, and Manila,” Business Insider reported in November.

Although the UN expert’s trip took place near the end of last year, her findings should alarm every American who is worried about our nation today.

“The crisis in San Francisco, she said, is comparable to these conditions [in foreign slums],” the Insider report continued.

One particular encounter with a homeless man caused Farha to compare San Francisco to some of the most dire places on earth.

“The last time I had seen someone cooking on the sidewalk like that was in India, with the pavement dwellers there, and here I am in San Francisco in a state with the sixth largest GDP in the world,” she said.

California, and especially far-left cities like San Francisco, aren’t something liberals want to talk about when discussing the real-world impacts of their policies.

But the U.N. expert noted that this is not a new problem, and it’s closely tied to liberalism.

“San Francisco’s crisis of open air drug markets, discarded needles, and piles of poop on the sidewalk dates back to the nation’s neo-liberal housing policies in the 1980s, according to Farha,” Business Insider reported.

But amazingly, Farha apparently wants more liberal government to swoop in and fix the problem.

“The idea that a government would deny people those services … when they have nowhere else to go suggests a kind of cruelty that is unsurpassed,” she said.

Maybe, just maybe, far-left government is actually part of the problem here.

As San Francisco becomes more liberal and acts as a magnet for illegal immigrants with its “sanctuary” policies, the problems have only increased.

Offering a seemingly endless buffet of more handouts and more taxpayer-funded programs appears to be perpetuating the problem, which now includes piles of human feces and hazardous needles.

What the failing liberal experiment in San Francisco shows is something conservatives have been saying for years: You cannot magically solve everyone’s problems by taxing and redistributing what other people have.

This only works to a point before the house of cards collapses.

Pretty soon, you either run out of other people’s money or cannot keep up with masses all demanding more and more “free” stuff.

Socialism, no matter how you label it or dress it up, has ended up collapsing every time it is tried.

You can add San Francisco’s failing leftism to that list, but don’t be surprised if politicians refuse to acknowledge that their experiments are stiffing a once-great state.