Many years ago, sometime after Ronald Reagan replaced Pat Brown as governor of California, I was driving up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco and visited San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s epic mansion. It was state property then, donated by the Hearst family, and the uniformed guide struck me as knowledgeable, competent, and proud of her work. Some time later, I wrote articles arguing that California, not yet the highest-tax state but never a tax haven either, was proof that big government could provide competent services. For a generation under Govs. Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan, California state government built thousands of miles of freeway, first-rate state universities, and a whole archipelago of community colleges and had begun to reduce smog in the Los Angeles basin. No one would write such an article about California today, except maybe in a humor magazine. The public sector that helped make California the nation’s most populous state in 1963 is today producing a dystopia that has tens of thousands more people leaving than arriving in the once promised land of California every year.
Even as California-based tech companies have reached market capitalization of $1 trillion, its state and local governments have sunk to levels of incompetence associated with underdeveloped countries.
