I am not much of a fan of George Will’s any more. He reminds me too much of alleged conservatives who prefer to be in the minority status as long as they get invited to the best Georgetown parties. He also does not know nearly as much about baseball as he thinks he does (but I digress). Here though he hits the target. California which went for Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1984 has gone way to the left and for many obvious reasons. First – because of the great weather it tends to attract whackos, second – because of all the illegal aliens who have become “amnestied” it has a large class of citizens who are government dependent and third – its municipal and state unions are all too powerful which leads to crushing taxes on private industry and even more stifling regulations. Posters here from California probably can come up with more reasons.
By George F. Will
Dalton Trumbo (1905-76) was a hero to the American left, partly because of his 1939 antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun.” Trumbo’s title modified the lyric “Johnny, get your gun” from the World War I song “Over There.” Trumbo’s “Johnny” is horribly maimed in that war. Now we need a novel titled “Berkeley Got Its Liberalism.” Pending that, we have Tad Friend’s report, in the Jan. 4 New Yorker, on maimed Berkeley.
California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit. So the University of California system’s budget was cut 20 percent. Then the system increased in-state student fees 32 percent to . . . $10,302. But that is still 70 percent below student costs at Stanford and other private institutions in California that Berkeley considers no better than it is.
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It took years for liberalism’s redistributive itch to create an income tax so steeply progressive that it prompts the flight from the state of wealth-creators: “Between 1990 and 2007,” Voegeli writes, “some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.”
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It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California’s welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico’s poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a “unionocracy,” run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year’s pay for life.
