California Kills the Goose

Thomas Sowell on what’s wrong with California:
“Maybe it is just local pride on my part, but I think California is the purest example of liberal fundamentalism….Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy, provided the goose doesn’t die before the next election. It could take decades to ruin California completely – – and meanwhile liberals can keep on getting elected again and again….
“Here you just advocate all the things that liberals find desirable and don’t worry about whether they are mutually contradictory, such as ‘open space’ laws and ‘affordable housing.’ Nor do you need to worry about whether all the heavy taxes used to finance giveaways are causing people and businesses to flee the state, taking the taxes they pay with them.
“After all, there are plenty of illegal aliens and panhandlers coming in to replace them.”
I think it was Adam Smith who wrote that there is a lot of ruin in a country. The same is true, it seems, for a state. But California’s decades of dissociation from reality are catching up with it.

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