On California
I read a good, if too short, article in the Monitor today that looks at some of California’s serious structural governance problems. I think they mention what I think are the biggest ones. It’s heartening to see that there’s a movement afoot to fix some of this stuff.
In my couple of years here, I’ve come to wonder whether this state is structurally broken to the point of needing to scrap its constitution and start over. I had actively started looking at California’s dreadful ballot initiative system years before I moved here after reading a David Broder book that looked at ballot initiatives generally, but that gave a lot of focus to California because of how prominent they are here. I want to like the ballot initiative system here because it seems so democratic on its face. In practice, though, it is almost always the side that raises the most money that wins regardless of how voters feel about the issue weeks or months before the election. I warned a bunch of people about this in relation to Prop 8 last year. Prop 8 was an almost perfect example of the problem. In the months before the election, polls indicated an electorally solid lead in favor of allowing gay couples to keep the rights they had. But after a massive influx of money for the Prop 8 supporters, much of it from people who do not live in this state, they were able to flood the airwaves with scare ads and turn the tables. Even though the emotions over the issue and the stakes being played for were much higher than normal, this was a text book example of how ballot initiatives work in this state.
Year in and year out, for decades, the voters of this state have said to its government “you can only tax X so much” and “you have to spend Y on Z every year” or sometimes just said “you have to X” with no provision for how it will be paid for. Each time the people add these new tax restrictions and spending mandates, they seems to do so with no regard for what they have mandated in years past. Most ballot initiatives don’t stick with people the way Prop 8 did and will. These conflicting priorities have left a state that is nearly ungovernable in good times. With the kind of economic crisis we’re facing now, even the horrible budget compromise that was just passed is going to have to go before the voters. In order to solve the 48 billion dollar shortfall, California has to borrow money from sources that have been mandated by ballot initiative for other purposes. All of this is exacerbated by the terrible, reactionary term limits stuff that California helped to pioneer. The people we elect simply don’t have the experience to tackle the problems we’re facing. They don’t spend enough time in the legislature to build the relationships with the other side that are necessary to effective compromise.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes California to recover from the current crisis. I hope we’re able to stay here to see it happen. I honestly don’t know how anyone who isn’t a venture funded high tech startup ever manages to start a small business in this state. My wife and I have tossed around ideas for a handful of different business ideas we’d be interested in picking from and starting someday. Every time we talk seriously about it, we look at the barriers that California puts up to actually hiring anyone else and always end up saying “we’d have to move back to some place cheap” to do it. I haven’t become one of those deregulation freaks. I think regulation, in the long run, is better for business itself and better for the society as a whole. California does a bunch of stuff the wrong way, though. First and foremost is the lack of rationality in the system. Too many regulations appear to overlap and contradict each other. Some regulations keep people from starting businesses all together. The mix between where regulations and taxes go after big business vs. where they go after small ones is way off.
