Distance can lend enchantment, and I fondly remember my holiday trips out west to California, trekking in Yosemite, drinking wines in Napa, gorging on seafood in San Francisco and Monterrey, firing handguns in Santa Clara, and wandering around Getty’s art museum in Malibu. Wonderful stuff. I started going there in the early 1990s to visit an old US buddy of mine who lived in Cupertino, in the San Jose area, at the time, working in the software business, as almost everyone else there seemed to do at the time. It seemed bright, shiny and incredibly affluent. IThe locals were very friendly. It is easy to see why the area can appeal to an outsider who has become fed up with crusty old Blighty.
But, and it is one hell of a big but, California has serious problems. The state government is about to go bust. The locals seem unable to stomach voting for less spending to curb runaway debt. Thousands of firms are relocating to cheaper places to do business where the regulations are less stifling, such as Nevada or Texas. California is, in many respects, a harbinger of what could happen to the rest of the US if Mr Obama gets his way with ideas such as carbon cap and trade, socialised medicine, heavier taxes on the middle and upper classes and more regulation of business. California is as near as it gets to a European-style social democracy. Well, the results are in, ladies and gentlemen, from this experiment, and it has been a disaster.
And for that reason alone, it is hardly very reassuring that David Cameron, or iDave, as he is sometimes called for his enthusiasm for all things trendily tecchy, is looking to California as a model. Of course, there was once a part of California – Orange County – that was a hotbed of libertarian-style conservatism in the heyday of Barry Goldwater and to a certain extent, under Ronald Reagan. But unless I have missed something, that Goldwaterite spirit of rugged individualism has gone on the wane in the Golden State.
It pays to watch California. In many ways, it has been a place that has set the tone not just for politics in the US, but by extension, in other English-speaking nations. So it pays to learn the right lessons.
From personal observations (and experiences) going back over 50 years or so, a case can be made that the “decline” began with the perversions of the legal system (being used for social and political functions).
Next come the several steps of the “fall.” It probably will look more like deterioration as it occurs (see, NJ, NY & MA), but in future retrospect it will seen for what it is.
Rome’s “decline” had its beginnings in elements other than those of its fall. So it is with CA. and other segments of both the U.S. and U.K.
While I get that some here find healthcare difficult to get over with, Romney was the most serious limited government candidate for POTUS in ’08, and OC was his best country for funding. Not completely dead.
Although Silicon Valley was never the libertarian center that you found in Orange Co, it had an incredible entrepreneurial spirit. But what happened last year appears emblematic of some significant change.
Micheal S. Malone: “No segment of American industry did more than high tech to elect Barack Obama…” How’d that turn out for them? The Obama Surprise(Link)
Mitt Romney may indeed have been “the most serious limited government candidate for POTUS in ’08”, but he is not so much a small-government enthusiast as a technocrat. He is a thoroughly competent business manager, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful political leader. Witness his forcing into effect the Massachusetts socialized health-care law, which has proven (as anyone awake expected) to be an abject disaster. I couldn’t support Romney in ’08 and won’t in ’12, either. (The same is true for Florida’s Gov. Crist, whose socialized hurricane insurance will bankrupt a once-solvent and reasonably well-governed state. Save us from big-government, populist “Republicans”!)
As for California (“the land of fruits and nuts”), the next few months should prove both interesting and instructive. When they ran out of cash they began issuing scrip (“I.O.U.’s”) in payment of their debts, but the big banks have just announced that they will stop accepting it (which seems perfectly rational). Fitch has dropped the State’s credit rating to BBB (still technically investment-grade, which seems blatant fraud to me), and unless Gov. Schwarzenegger succeeds in persuading the federal government to bail them out default seems all but inevitable. Is this a leading indicator for the nation as a whole? Time will tell.
Federal Government of course meaning taxpayers of other states. Would the other states, or the citizens thereof. have grounds to sue the Feds and CA for damages? California still has a pretty large, (rapidly declining but still quite big), GDP so YTF should a taxpayer of a state that cuts its suit according to its cloth fork out to support the californicator’s profligate lifestyle.
Pity that idiot Sanford made such a plonker of himself since he might be ideally suited to lead the charge.
Sorry, Kevin B, but I don’t think your lawsuit idea would work. All the other states are salivating over federal largesse, too, and all seem to think that there is an endless pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in Washington; the fact that it’s all been stolen from the taxpayers (even in their own states) doesn’t seem to register. And the federal courts won’t recognize a “derivative”-style lawsuit by taxpayers; it’s been tried, and the courts have consistently held that taxpayers have no “standing” to maintain the suit (they never even have to resort to the sovereign immunity defense).
I agree with you about Sanford, though. Hey, it’s still pretty far from the 2011 primaries, though, so maybe he can resurrect himself by then. Stranger things have happened. At the moment it seems that Bobby Jindall is our best hope, but don’t really know much about him.
its not all dead in california, there are still flickers…
someone in NorCal has come up with maybe the slogan of the next campaign:
Oh
Boy
Another
Massive
Appropriation
–SIGH–California hasn’t balanced it’s budget in over 40 years. As a Pennsylvanian, it sickens me whenever I hear how Cali ‘leads the nation’ because so much of what comes out of it is disturbing nonsense. I vote to keep the inland areas, but set the coastline inhabitants adrift.
Actually Governor Romney was the only Republican running in 2008 who had established “universal health care” – the program that has failed in Massachusetts, in spite of Massachusetts having had (before Romney even arrived) one of the lowest proportion of people uncovered by health care plans in the country – so “if it does not even work in Mass…..”
True Governor Romney made a great show of vetoing some spending items in his final months in office – but that was after he had decided to run for the nomination (and he knew the incomming Democrat Governor of Mass would reverse the vetos).
On the other hand real conservatives like Senator DeMint of South Carolina (he of the book “Saving Freedom”) supported Governor Romney (as did Ann Coulter) – so perhaps they managed to see something I just miss.
As for California – a lot of good people, but the statists have the whip hand.
McCormack (the “Jeffersonian Republican” – i.e. really the Goldwater Republican) could not even win the Republican nomination for a lot of posts.
Although there are still some decent newspapers in (financially troubled) San Diego and (yes) Orange County. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly on the left – not just the newspapers (such as the LA Times – that fell to the left back in the 1960’s) but on television and even on the internet (the computer rich include some decent people, but most of them are really bad, they follow every “Progressive” fad).
The fiscal position of the State is indeed terrible – and the Federal government (who they are counting on to rescue them) is even worse shape (the vast sums being spent on proping up the American, and the British, economies are going to make things worse in the long run – and the long run is not that long now).
David Cameron should be told that California is an example to be avoided.
Including in energy – its low energy useage per person is partly because it has mild winters and (compared to the East Coast of the United States) even not totally demented summers. But it is also because manufacturing industry is fleeing the State.
A closed factory uses less energy than a functioning factory – but that is not a good thing.
California does not even build nuclear power stations anymore (where does in the United States?) the situtation is bad.
Even farming is under threat – for example some areas have water but it is just run off into the Pacific.
This is because pumping the water into irrigation systems would supposedly harm a small fish that no one can eat anyway.
No I am not making this up – a lot of farmers (including hispanic farmers by the way) in the Central Valley of California, are being destroyed over this tiny fish.
Bankruptcy, out of control immigration, deindustrialisation, high crime… we already have all of these problems in Britain. California certainly isn’t a good model.
And what’s more, being in a family with a number of California liberals, the one thing they blame for their problems is proposition 13, which severely limits property taxes in the state. They’d have a point, except that the state simply shifts more taxes onto income, sales, and, well, everything else that involves money. It never dawns on them that having a massive non-taxpaying demographic sucking down free healthcare and benefits, plus an outrageous pensions and entitlements scheme, might possibly have something to do with our cash problems.
California has some structural problems. You can pile on the debt with a majority vote, but raising taxes takes a supermajority. The districts are so finely gerrymandered representatives at the state level never have a reason to compromise. Except during natural disasters the governorship is virtually a ceremonial position. And more.
But the biggest problem here (I live in the SF bay area) is the voters. People here seem to think debt and revenue are the same thing. Maybe it’s a holdover from the dot-com bubble, where startups with no plan for profits were able to finance operations with debt. I dunno. But we’ve been issuing bonds for years to fund the sorts of ongoing expenses you would more prudently pay with taxes. And more bonds to pay the interest on the first set.
Now we’re at the end of the classic debt spiral, like the guy you knew in college who paid of credit cards with cash advances from other cards. It didn’t end well for him and it won’t end well for California.
The games the federal government is playing have a distinctly familiar feel to those of us in the Golden State who’ve been swearing and shaking our heads for a decade or so. But the feds can get out of the problem by inflating the currency, stealing a little bit of every dollar everywhere in the world. And they will, too – it’s the only way out of the debt Obama is running up.
Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009(Link)
Orange county CA was targeted by the aerospace depression during the Clinton administration (200,000 defense hi tech jobs lost in the area) and raped by the land developers who built high density housing for the liberal yuppies who worked in LA but didn’t want to live there. Add in about a million illegal immigrants, many of whom vote and you can see the place is a slowly dying ember of it’s former glory. The last straw was the housing bubble which is now taking it’s toll.
In the last election, the county narrowly went for Obama. Orange Co. RIP.
Small niggle: by no stretch of the imagination could Barry Goldwater ever have been included in the libertarian tent.
Yes, he had some things in common with Librarian philosophy (e.g. a vitriolic loathing of large government), but a few similarities do not make a conservative a libertarian. No matter how much a libertarian may wish it to be so.
Good grief: I saw John Locke described as a libertarian the other day. The old boy must be spinning in his grave.
The anti-development greenies are in charge of permitting and don’t allow construction of adequate housing, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices. The affordability index for housing in LA for a middle income family is 2%. Meaning, 2% of middle income families in LA can afford to buy any type of housing. That’s just wrong.
The state workers are full of themselves and think taxpayers are their bitches.(Link)
You have a point Kim du Toit – I made the mistake about John Locke myself (when I was a boy).
I assumed that “right to life” meant a right not to be murdered, whereas Locke really did mean a welfare “right to be kept alive at taxpayers expense”. He even wrote (for example in the V…… spelling alert) that a ships captain with a cargo of food who passed by a port in which people were starving (in the hope of getting a better price at another port – there being no contract with anyone in the first port) was “no doubt guilty of murder” – a position that would make all overseas AND DOMESTIC trade impossible. As there is always someone starving somewhere – so if one is only going to be allowed to charge the price they can afford…..
And there is also the stuff about “leet men and leet women” (serfs) in the plans he wrote out for the Carolinas (this was at a time when there had not been real serfs in England for centuries and the man wanted to reintroduce them “for all generations” in the new world).
And as for some of the stuff John Locke wrote Ireland …..
But Barry Goldwater?
What was wrong with him?
If we mean he did not endorse XYZ of the libertarian platform O.K. – but he was certainly a good guy.
And not just on “economic issues” – remember his reaction to enforcing religion “every good Christian should kick Jerry Falwell up the arse”.
A bit unfair on Jerry Falwell – but it made Goldwater’s position plain.
Just to repeat – California has some of the highest (if not the very highest) taxes in the nation, so a supermajority to raise taxes is not one of the State’s problems.
As for low property taxes (Prop 13) – Alabama has much lower property taxes (and I am talking about as a percentage of real estate value, I know it is historically a poorer State).
What matters is spending – whether it is supported by “educated” (i.e. brainwashed) voters or immigrant voters.
The sad thing is that the “educated” classes really are high intelligence people (although, being young, they have a low resistance level to conditioning). The “liberal” elite identify the many young intelligent people and then “educate” them.