The Misanthropic Delusions of California’s Ruling Class

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Earlier this week I attended an event in downtown Sacramento produced by an industry trade association. One of the highlights of this event was a plenary session where a high ranking state politician addressed the crowd. The participants shall remain anonymous, because who they were doesn’t matter. What was said, and how it was received, was generic and repeats itself everywhere. The elites that run California are all in the grip of a mass delusion.

The mantra that defines this delusion is “climate change” and the associated sound bites are predictable and uniform: “catastrophic wildfires,” “extreme weather,” “blistering heat,” etc., all of which are evidence of the “climate emergency.” To a skeptic, hearing the incessant, mindless repetition of these soundbites is terrifying, because the policies designed to supposedly cope with the climate emergency are going to destroy Western Civilization.

Therein lies the delusion, and describing this misanthropic folly only as delusion may be giving these policymakers too much credit. Because if it isn’t delusion that impels our ruling class to dismantle and destroy conventional energy infrastructure with nothing remotely capable of replacing it, then it is corruption on a scale rarely seen in the history of the world, and a stupefying indifference to the consequences of that corruption.

Anyone who has watched how the politicians in Sacramento have used the “climate emergency” to overregulate everything, driving the prices for energy, water, housing and transportation to levels only the rich can afford, must struggle with cynicism. And so it is fair to wonder what was really going through the mind of this politician when asked, by a lone skeptic at the afore mentioned event, how on earth Californians expected to electrify the entire residential and transportation sectors while adhering to a goal of “net zero” carbon emissions.

Instead of displaying even a rudimentary grasp of the numbers, the politician conjured up an anecdote, describing how the state is encouraging investment in floating wind turbines, to be located 20 miles offshore, “taller than the Eiffel Tower,” cabled to the continental shelf and capable of delivering massive quantities of electricity to homes and industry onshore.

This is a hideous, grotesquely impractical idea. Floating towers over 1,000 feet in height, with massive spinning blades to harvest wind no matter how harsh the storms may be, stabilized with cables anchored to the continental shelf more than 500 feet underwater. What could possibly go wrong?

But imagine that somehow these offshore turbines work as designed. Imagine that in spite of the paralytic permit environment and litigious hellscape that confronts any developer, these wind turbines somehow get built. How many of these monstrosities would we need?

As it is, the average draw on California’s electricity grid is roughly 35 gigawatts, 30 percent of which already has to be sourced from outside California. To electrify California’s transportation and residential sectors, replacing petroleum and natural gas, generating capacity will need to double.

The biggest wind turbines being deployed on earth generate about 10 megawatts at full output. But even offshore where the trade winds blow more consistently than on land, these turbines are only going to have a “yield” of around 40 percent, and that’s being generous. This means each installed turbine’s average electricity generation over time is 4 megawatts. And that means to double California’s electricity generating capacity, we would have to install nearly 10,000 of these Eiffel Towers off the California coast.

Delusional defenders of this epic scam may indignantly point out that there are other forms of renewable energy. They’re right. Solar energy is the biggest ecologically acceptable alternative to wind energy. But bear in mind that to achieve “net zero,” California’s state legislature isn’t merely going to need to double existing generating capacity, they’re going to have to retire all of the natural gas fueled generating plants. If you include power coming in from out-of-state, natural gas fuels almost two-thirds of California’s existing electricity consumption.

That means to achieve “net zero” with wind energy alone, over 15,000 gigantic floating wind turbines would be required. Onshore wind isn’t nearly as practical. The turbines are not as big, the wind isn’t as reliable. Solar farms can achieve results at scale, but with wintertime yields even in sunny California only averaging around 13 percent, finding another 60 gigawatts would require over 3,000 square miles of solar farms. We can’t build single family dwellings anymore because they take up too much space, but solar sprawl is ok. Let’s not forget the high voltage lines to connect all these decentralized sources of energy, or the gigawatt-hours of required battery storage.

These are facts. There isn’t a single competent engineer or financial accountant in the world that doesn’t understand what “net zero” portends. In private conversations, invariably, they are incredulous. How can the entire ruling class of California – a state with the smartest, wealthiest, most innovative people on earth – be so stupid, or so corrupt? “Renewable” energy is not renewable. It relies on orders of magnitude more raw materials than conventional energy, most of it imported from nations with appalling records of environmental and labor abuse. It is expensive and inadequate, and can only lead to a widening of the gap between rich and poor.

That these facts are known leads to the most inexcusable corruption of all, the decision by energy companies and civil engineering firms to accept this delusion instead of fighting it with all the resources at their disposal. Instead of exposing the “net zero” goal as a misanthropic fraud and power grab, California’s corporations, joined by their counterparts throughout the Western World, are opportunistically navigating a profitable path forward that embraces the delusion. Instead of promoting rational and practical policies to prosperously adapt to whatever comes our way, California’s business elites are using scarcity and high prices to consolidate their power while impoverishing the masses.

Achieving “net zero” is a delusion. Until a politician is numerate enough, honest enough, and courageous enough to challenge the delusion, there is no hope. Until a wealthy individual or very large corporation decides to challenge the delusion, and use their financial resources to deprogram California’s voters, there is no hope. Until there is hope, we can vote for nobody, and we can boycott everything. That, too, would be delusional.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Trump Again Defines National Priorities

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Political observers and partisan activists debate whether Donald Trump or some other Republican candidate has the best chance of beating a Democratic rival in the 2024 presidential election. But earlier this month, Trump demonstrated that just as he did in 2016, he is raising campaign issues central to America’s future, issues that no other candidate is talking about. The latest flare-ups of what have been nearly eight years of relentless, orchestrated prosecution of Trump are a massive distraction but don’t change this reality.

Candidate Trump in 2016 raised issues Michael Anton adroitly summarized in “The Flight 93 Election” as “open borders, lower wages, outsourcing, de-industrialization, trade giveaways, and endless, pointless, winless war.” Making these neglected issues the themes of his campaign, Trump beat the odds and won the election. These are now among the most public and polarizing issues in America. They may be unresolved, but they are now central instead of peripheral.

This time, Trump’s 2024 campaign website includes under his agenda a list of the issues that have defined him since his political debut. They include deregulation, opportunity zones, fair trade, reshoring of industry, energy dominance, secure borders, reclaiming national sovereignty, war on drug cartels, law and order, military readiness, parents’ rights, ending censorship, election integrity, and more. Anyone questioning the coherence of Trump’s policy agenda is invited to read this list, which is long on specifics. But in a video released on his campaign website on March 4, Trump looked into the future.

The Future According to Trump

Calling it Agenda 47—presumably based on his aspiration to become America’s 47th president—Trump challenges Americans to once again “pursue big dreams and daring projects.” He points to previous national accomplishments, such as the settlement of the frontier, the interstate highway system, and the deployment of communications satellites. In what he characterized as America’s next “quantum leap” in progress, Trump calls for a national contest for urban developers to submit designs for new “Freedom Cities,” with 10 winning designs to be allocated federal land for their construction.

Trump then enumerates several related goals, including calling for American industry to win the race to commercialize airborne mobility, revitalization of economically depressed regions by investing in the manufacturing assets we’re going to need as we disconnect from China, and initiatives to lower the cost of a car and lower the cost of a single-family home. Trump also wants “baby bonuses” to encourage a new baby boom in America. Finally, Trump says he would challenge the state governors to make cities and towns more livable and build monuments to American heroes.

At the conclusion of Trump’s four-minute video, he vows to “dramatically increase living standards and build a future that brings our country together through excitement, opportunity, and success.”

Trump is on to something. Every one of his goals is a driver of productivity and innovation, starting with new cities. Why shouldn’t the federal government allow for the privatization of a mere 0.5 percent of federal land in the United States? That would be roughly 5,000 square miles which, if split evenly and allocated as squares, would be 10 new cities, each 22 miles on a side.

What’s intriguing about this proposal is that at its core it is a libertarian notion—turning public land back over to the private sector. Digging deeper, it invites Americans to create 10 futuristic scenarios for urban development on a blank slate. The mix of public and private funding could be left up to the individual participating states. How these cities planned to manage their transportation, energy, food, water, and waste management challenges could differ greatly, and how successful each of them would be could then become an instructive model for urban revitalization all over America.

Red states might strike a balance between innovation and sticking with more cost-effective conventional building codes and enabling infrastructure, whereas in blue states, one might expect new cities that aspire to become models of sustainability, hopefully in sufficiently practical applications. Plenty of innovations are at our disposal today, including using laminated timber for construction of high-rise and mid-rise structures, innovative ways to reuse water and harvest nutrients from wastewater, indoor agriculture, and radical expansion of transportation conduits, both underground and in the air.

It Might Be “The Jetsons”

Even some of Trump’s media detractors acknowledged that decentralized air mobility is just around the corner. Within a decade or less, we will begin seeing small passenger drones ferrying people from point to point within and between cities. The surprising simplicity of the technology, leveraging what we’re learning from unmanned drones and self-driving cars, may eventually bring the prices down within reach of the average consumer.

And Trump is absolutely right when he urges Americans to pioneer this technology, which will yield valuable technological spin-offs, relieve traffic congestion on the ground, and open up otherwise inaccessible real estate.

Several years ago, discussing his groundbreaking (pun intended) tunneling company, Elon Musk said, “the construction industry is one of the only sectors in our economy that has not improved its productivity in the last 50 years.” While Musk might have overstated his case, new developments in materials science, robotics, electronics, communications, and systems integration promise to revolutionize the construction industry. And again, to paraphrase Trump, that revolution is going to happen in America, or it is going to happen somewhere else.

The fact that we are developing the capacity to use new materials and technologies to build and manufacture at far lower costs brings credibility to Trump’s challenge to reduce the cost of cars, single-family homes, and the cost of living generally. Trump’s commitment to deregulation—clearly demonstrated in his first term—perhaps along with new and bipartisan antitrust legislation, could be the key to a new era of competition as major manufacturers and developers adopt new technologies to create 21st-century versions of the Model T concept: cars and homes that families with a single wage earner can nonetheless afford. This is a goal worthy of a great nation.

From Baby Bust to Baby Boom

Which brings us to one of the most urgent issues in America that nobody’s talking about: the Baby Bust. It’s been a long time coming. In 1988, observing that baby boomers were not having children at replacement levels, demographer Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies?. His book was prophetic. It turns out the entire developed world, including the United States, is experiencing a population crash. In the United States, the severity of the problem is temporarily obscured by the fact that baby boomers (Americans born between 1946 and 1964, years when birth rates were unusually high) are only beginning to reach the end of their natural life spans, and because since 1988 the United States has admitted tens of millions of immigrants.

A population crash in the United States is no joke. Our current replacement rate of 1.6 births per woman means that for every 1 million Americans today, there will only be 440,000 great-grandchildren. Put another way, if the time span of one generation averages 25 years, based on current birth rates, two-thirds of America’s total population will be wiped out within the next century. There are only two ways to stop this: mass replacement of the population through immigration or increased native birth rates.

For Trump to launch a serious national dialogue about what it is going to take to increase birth rates in America is perhaps the most futurist oriented, and the most consequential, of all the new issues he’s raising. Trump is proposing “baby bonuses” in the form of financial incentives for couples to have more children.

But Trump’s other new priorities also should make it easier for young Americans to choose to have more children: creating room for growth in new cities, creating new job opportunities by reshoring manufacturing jobs, stimulating new technologies and boosting productivity with air mobility, and by making homes and cars affordable.

Bringing Americans Together

Trump’s final priority, echoing themes he’s explored before, adds an intangible incentive for people to form families. As he put it, we will “bring our country together through excitement, opportunity, and success.”

There is a shared excitement created by beautifying America’s urban spaces, by making cities and towns more livable, and by building monuments to American heroes. It makes people feel like they’re part of something big and worthwhile. It is a unifying force with a natural attractive power completely missing from the leftist obsession to make “inclusion” a mandate.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who has announced his intention to compete with Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, seems pretty solid on many issues. He has repeatedly stated that one of the biggest challenges facing Americans today is to define “what does it mean to be an American?” Trump, with the new issues he’s bringing before the American people, is answering that question. To be optimistic, successful, and excited by what promises to be a dazzling future.

Trump is not only raising the core issues facing Americans today that no other politician has the vision or courage to raise. This is also the side of Trump that nobody acknowledges outside of his own supporters. Trump has indulged in sometimes overwrought counterattacks in the ongoing and perpetual campaign of character assassination against him. But nonetheless, he quietly and tirelessly worked for solutions during his entire presidency, from funding black colleges and eliminating excessive federal regulations to encouraging medical freedom and implementing criminal justice reform. It’s a long list. Now Trump is identifying new challenges and proposing big solutions.

It is healthy and necessary to debate who may be the best standard bearer for the GOP in November 2024 and who may be the candidate most likely to win. But Donald Trump has again defined the territory over which that contest will be fought, and for that, once again, he has done us all a tremendous service.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Realigning California Will Realign America

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The conventional wisdom among conservatives in most of the rest of America is that California is a lost cause. Rather than fight inside California, where you are up against the most powerful and monolithic alliance of progressive special interests in the world, dedicate resources to flipping purple states, and keeping red states red. But to invert a popular quote attributed to Nietzsche, even if you do not gaze into the abyss, the abyss will still gaze back into you.

California’s role in influencing the future of the entire country is unparalleled. In addition to its economic and demographic weight, California remains the epicenter of America’s media and entertainment industry, as well as its high-tech industry. Even if several American states defy the momentum of California’s political class, laws governing California frequently end up becoming federal policy. The abyss is coming for us all, and its epicenter is in California.

It is expensive to engage in public education in a state with a population of nearly 40 million, including 22 million registered voters. California’s political culture is almost completely dominated by social radicals and environmentalist extremists. But if the challenges to changing the political culture in California are daunting, the potential rewards are even greater.

There is an immediate financial incentive for conservatives to take the fight into the belly of the beast, which is that whatever money California’s well heeled public sector unions and progressive billionaires have to spend on defense in their own state is money that will not be used to swing close races in other states. The question then only becomes how to engage in asymmetric warfare to ensure that California’s progressives spend far more money on defense than their attackers spend on offense. In this manner, even if the political battle is lost, the money battle is victorious.

An example of this strategy is Proposition 32, waged in 2012 by conservative reformers attempting to force government unions to obtain consent from their members before they could spend any of their dues on political campaigning. A lot was at stake for these public sector unions, which in California spend an estimated $600 million on political campaigning and lobbying each two year election cycle. That’s a lot of money even in California. Voters rejected Proposition 32, but proponents spent $10 million, whereas the union defenders spent over $108 million. That’s $98 million that did not flow into the rest of the U.S. in the election of 2012.

In general, ballot initiatives are a good way to keep California’s progressive elites off balance and drain their treasuries. Qualifying a ballot initiative in California today will cost proponents between $5 and $10 million. But if it represents a serious threat to the environmentalist industrial complex, the woke tycoons, or the government unions, they will spend many times that amount to defeat it. And as proven as recently as November 2020, when eight of the nine state ballot propositions supported by unions were rejected by voters, California’s electorate should not be taken for granted.

California’s Electorate is Ready for a Change

This fact, that sometimes voters can surprise the experts and completely flip the political script in a state or a nation, is another reason for conservatives to refocus on California. Also unique to California is its demographic composition, which is likely to be mirrored in America within a generation. California’s population by ethnicity is roughly 40 percent Hispanic, 35 percent non-Hispanic white, 15 percent Asian, 5 percent black, and 5 percent multi-racial. Among Californians under 20 years of age, non-Hispanic whites are now less than 22 percent of the population.

Any effort to change political culture in California might benefit by first recognizing that the hardest bloc of big government supporters to convert are its diminishing cohort of white liberals. Living by the millions in inherited homes and thus not liable for either a mortgage or significant property taxes, they are exempt from the worst consequences of California’s failing institutions. For California’s financially secure white progressives, the rising cost for essentials is an inconvenience instead of an existential threat. They live in upscale neighborhoods where the public schools have better teachers and more resources, or, equally likely, they don’t have any school age children. And they are concentrated in areas where crime rates are low. California’s white voters support progressive Democrats because they don’t suffer the consequences of progressive Democrat policy failures. It’s much easier to believe the abstract Democrat mantras about climate change and systemic racism when more tangible challenges don’t exist. That’s the reality for millions of white progressives in California. Write them off.

When it comes to realigning California politics, white conservatives are already on board, and the white progressives are immovable fanatics. The future opportunity for conservatives in California today are Asians and Hispanics who are increasingly receptive to three primary messages: (1) Policies that create scarcity and high prices are by design, and only benefit crony capitalists, (2) public education at all grade levels in California is failing, and (3) punishing crime deters crime. With respect to scarcity and the cost of living, and also with respect to rescuing public education, deregulation to encourage competition is the answer. As for California’s crime problem, which like skyrocketing utility bills and lousy schools is disproportionately harming nonwhite communities, if criminal penalties were enhanced instead being scrapped as per the progressive agenda, crime would be deterred and eventually fewer criminals would need to be incarcerated.

Two misconceptions have driven unsuccessful efforts to change political culture in California. First, that the primary political concern of nonwhites, primarily Hispanics, are social issues such as pro-life sentiments, and second, that more generally, nonwhites favor bigger government. Neither of these assumptions are true. To be clear, California’s non-white residents care greatly about social issues, and are generally pro-life voters. And while their consistent support for Democrats might imply a big government bias, all it really indicates is that Democrats have made more alluring promises to nonwhites, while successfully stigmatizing Republicans as racist. Those promises have not been kept, and as the Democratic mantra of equity ascends into the stratosphere of absurdities, accusations of racism are wearing thin. The most urgent concerns for nonwhite voters in California, becoming more urgent all the time, are to live in a state with an affordable cost-of-living, good schools and safe streets. Consequently, efforts to realign California should target Asians and Hispanics, and should emphasize pro-abundance policies, school choice, and support for law enforcement.

When running the numbers, realigning California isn’t that far fetched. Not generally acknowledged is the fact that more voters in California in 2020 supported Trump – over six million – than any other state. More than Texas. More than Florida. Also largely missed is the fact that for all their money, the Democratic machine in California still misfires. In November 2020, 17.8 million voters cast ballots in California. In November 2022, only 11.1 million ballots were cast. This is an astonishing statistic. It belies the notion that the Democrat vote harvesting operation is consistently activated and effective. It also suggests that a Republican vote harvesting operation, had it been activated in 2022, might have led to surprising victories for Republican candidates across the state. And it suggests that if California’s conservative populist base, six million strong, were to consistently turn out and vote, it would not take a significant shift in the voting patters of Asians and Hispanics to flip California red.

Democrats in California are the party of big business, tech companies, environmentalist extremists, and government unions. Their self-serving policies have made the state unaffordable, punitively hostile to small businesses and independent contractors, with a public school system that’s a joke, and huge swaths of its urban neighborhoods that are now crime infested no-go zones. Nobody who is victimized by this reality is happy with it, and if they are offered credible alternatives they will dump the Democrat incumbents who created this mess.

What is happening in California is not only a threat that cannot be ignored. It is an historic opportunity for conservatives across America. As goes California, so goes the nation.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

LAUSD’s Unions Could Support Policies to Help All Californians

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Here we go again. The Los Angeles Unified School District employees are moving closer to going on strike. We saw this as recently as 2019, when the United Teachers of Los Angeles went on strike. They got modest wage increases for their efforts but left the district in worse financial condition.

This year it’s the LAUSD’s service workers, represented by the SEIU, threatening to strike, claiming the district has $4.9 billion in reserves. LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has flatly contradicted that figure, stating “We’re not sitting on $5 billion worth of reserves, and to say that is inspiring false hope — period. I stand by it.”

“Reserves” turns out to be a somewhat ambiguous number. While there may be an impressive sounding amount of unallocated cash available today, the district is projected to spend about $1 billion more than it will take in over the next two fiscal years, and already anticipated increases to staffing and new programs will reduce the unallocated portion of that $4.9 billion.

According to the SEIU, the average annual salary for the 30,000 LAUSD service workers they represent is $25,000. About 75 percent of the members work fewer than eight hours per day, and with school in session only 180 days, or 36 weeks per year, even many of the workers with full-time hours are off for up to 16 weeks per year.

Union representatives themselves acknowledge LAUSD’s reliance on a part-time workforce. But it raises an uncomfortable question that applies to teachers as well: If K-12 schools in California only operate for the equivalent of 36 full weeks per year, is it reasonable for people working in these schools to expect to earn enough to cover the full year of expenses? Similarly, if some of the service jobs only require a worker for a few hours each day, how can they possibly afford to pay for a full day of work?

These are difficult questions. But LAUSD, and the unions representing LAUSD’s workers, have to start by recognizing that if there were an efficient way to convert every part-time worker to full-time work, thousands of part-time workers would have to be let go. And until California’s public schools require not 36 weeks per year of active service, but the 48 weeks which is typical in the private sector, they should not expect to receive annual pay equivalent to what people in similar jobs make in the private sector.

Whether or not there is enough cash today to grant the LAUSD’s service workers the 30 percent wage increase they’re demanding, the long-term financial outlook of the district remains troubled. The average annual pension and benefit package for a full-career LAUSD retiree in the CalSTRS system in 2021 was over $77,000. Meanwhile, the funded status of CalSTRS on June 30, 2022 was a dismal 67 percent. CalSTRS is staring down an unfunded liability of $104 billion. This translates into a huge financial burden on LAUSD. In their current budget, 12 percent will go to CalSTRS, over $2 billion. As CalSTRS copes with a moribund stock market, real estate values that are topping out, and the attenuating burden of DEI restrictions on where they can place their investments, expect that number to rise.

LAUSD receives funds based on student attendance, like all public schools in California, and how much that per student rate has gone up is tied to the state’s general fund budget. According to reports downloaded from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), and after adjusting for inflation and for population growth, the state’s general fund budget is up 84 percent compared to just ten years ago. Put another way, the state’s per capita general fund spending in the current fiscal year is just under $6,000 per California resident, and ten years ago — in 2022 dollars — it was just over $3,000 per resident.

This increase translates into vastly more funds for LAUSD, because 38 percent of all General Fund expenditures go to K-14 public education in California. When general fund spending goes up, school districts get 38 percent of the increase. In the case of LAUSD, however, the increase over the past ten years has been equally dramatic. Their General Fund expenditures in 2012-13 were $5.8 billion. In their 2022-23 adopted budget, the General Fund projection is $12.6 billion, a doubling in just ten years. Meanwhile, enrollment at LAUSD is down below 600,000 this year, lower than it’s been in over 30 years. Where did the money go?

The unions representing SEIU membership in LAUSD may or may not get the windfall they’re demanding. But along with their need to perpetually negotiate wage increases that keep up with California’s exploding cost-of-living, they have to recognize that the nature of work in California’s public schools necessitates a lot of part-time, partial year employment. Until that structural obstacle is somehow overcome, they’re pushing water uphill.

They might also recognize that California’s state legislature, over which the coalition of public sector unions they are part of exercises overwhelming control, is directly responsible for California being unaffordable for working families. They might support state investment in practical water, power, and transportation infrastructure, such as we saw back in the Pat Brown days. These investments paved the way for an oversupply of homes and abundant, cheap water and power. That is a path to prosperity for everyone in the state, and an inspiring objective that these unions have the power to make a reality.

An edited version of this article appeared as a guest op-ed in the Orange County Register.

The Pat Brown Republicans

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California old timers can remember the state’s first Governor Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, who served as the 32nd governor of California from 1959 to 1967. It would be difficult to imagine anything the elder Brown did that would be in alignment with the Democratic politicians currently running California.

The achievements of the Pat Brown era, and the policies that made them a reality, are needed today more than ever. Back then California was affordable and safe, and its public education from kindergarten through graduate school was the best in the world. Today, with its incredible wealth, diverse economy, and vast resources, there is no reason why California can’t achieve this quality of life again.

If the Democratic party has abandoned the policies of the Pat Brown era, and they have, the Republicans in California stand in desperate need of new policy ideas that voters will find compelling. This weekend delegates from every corner of the state are congregating in Sacramento to discuss the future of their party. The good news, if you want to call it that, is California’s Republicans have nowhere to go but up. In the wake of the 2022 midterms, Republican seats in the state legislature are the lowest they’ve been in the history of the state; they hold 18 out of 80 seats in the Assembly, and 8 out of 40 seats in the Senate.

Republicans have plenty of reasons to explain their unprecedented irrelevancy in California. Proposition 187 in 1994, supported by Republicans, denied public services to undocumented immigrants. Proposition 8 in 2008, supported by some Republicans and opposed by others, banned same sex marriage. Ironically, both of these measures were approved by California voters, but they were both eventually overturned, and they no longer reflect the majority sentiment of voters. The only lasting result of these two propositions is that they are still used by Democrats to claim that Republican politicians, and the Republican voters that support them, are despicable bigots. They are the disqualifying gift that just keeps giving.

In more recent years, Democrats have managed to reinforce the Republican bigot brand by attaching Donald Trump to every Republican candidate. The truth is irrelevant, of course. Not every Republican candidate in California is aligned with Trump, and, notwithstanding his bombast and braggadocio, Trump is probably not a bigot. But the stain doesn’t easily fade, and in politics that’s all that matters.

A New Brand for Republicans

While California’s GOP may have hit bottom with voters, new political opportunities are developing. California is not affordable, its cities are not safe, and its K-12 public education system is delivering some of the worst results in the country instead of being among the best. But it isn’t enough to say “Democrats did this, so vote Republican.” It isn’t even enough to say “Democrats did this, and here, exactly, is how Republicans are going to fix everything.”

Having specific policy options available under the umbrella issues of affordability, safety, and education is an essential prerequisite, but it won’t matter if the carefully curated toxic Republican brand, inculcated in the minds of California’s voters for decades, isn’t decisively replaced. And a replacement, recognizable and alluring, neglected by Democrats, is waiting to be seized.

Here is how the California Museum’s website describes Governor Pat Brown:

“Governor Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown ushered in a golden age, making California famous for having the biggest water system, the best higher education, the longest highways, and an economy exceeding that of nations.”

“A Golden Age.” Now that’s a brand.

These policies of the 1950s and 1960s, implemented by Democrats, are policies that will excite Californians, and they are the only way to bring a Golden Age back to California. What Pat Brown did for California was build an infrastructure that was oversized at the time, and because of the resulting abundance in water, transportation, and educational assets, the cost of doing business and the cost of building homes was made affordable. Living here back then was so affordable that – imagine this – only one parent needed to have a full-time job to own a home and raise a family.

Things can get that good again. California’s state government needs deregulation to encourage private investment in enabling infrastructure, and it needs to issue general obligation bonds to pay for infrastructure wherever private funding isn’t sufficient. And the money the state invests in lowering the cost of living will come from savings elsewhere. When there is broad based prosperity, instead of record poverty, spending on social programs plummets because the need evaporates.

The entire Pat Brown era is instructive. Crime rates were low because criminals faced certain punishment. This deterred crime, resulting in lower rates of incarceration and fewer prisons. K-12 education as well enforced accountability. If a young student was disruptive, they would end up in reform school, and if they remained incorrigible, they ended up at the boys ranch (or the girls ranch). This certainty of discipline as well deterred misbehavior, minimizing the need for juvenile detention facilities.

In the Pat Brown era, vagrancy and public intoxication were crimes, which, surprise, deterred vagrancy and public intoxication. And voila, billions of dollars were not being fed into the insatiable maw of the homeless industrial complex. The list goes on. This was life in a state ran by Democrats, with a Democrat governor.

A popular movement within the national Republican party is the so-called “walk away” campaign, which encourages liberals to leave the Democratic party. But if California’s independent voters were told that the Democratic party itself has walked away from its own Pat Brown era roots, and that’s why the state is unaffordable and unsafe, it would resonate.

If California’s Republicans brand themselves as Pat Brown Republicans, and emulate the policies of the Pat Brown era, they might just finally throw off the negative labels that have worked so well, and hurt so much.

Unionized Public Education is Destroying California

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Behind any popular mass movement there are good ideas and noble objectives. The labor movement is no exception. Organized labor, ideally, offers collective power to ordinary workers and provides a counterweight whenever business interests become exploitative. How to regulate that balance is topic that deserves vigorous and ongoing debate, but most of the benefits American workers take for granted—certainly including overtime pay, sick leave, and safe working conditions—were negotiated by private sector unions.

Public sector unions are a different story entirely. Unlike private sector unions, through their political campaign contributions they elect their own bosses. Unlike private sector unions, the government agencies they work for collect taxes instead of competing to earn a profit. Public sector unions run the machinery of government, which makes it easy for the more zealous members to use their bureaucratic authority to intimidate any citizen or business that opposes their agenda or their chosen candidates.

There’s more. Because the agenda of unions, naturally enough, is to increase their membership and the pay and benefits of their members, there is a constant danger of that agenda conflicting with the public interest. If a government program fails to serve the public interest, it is tempting for the government union leadership to claim that failure can only be addressed by spending more money and hiring more unionized government employees. For them, therefore, all too often failure is success. But the taxpayers lose.

The Worst, Most Destructive Union in America

If government unions are inherently more problematic than private sector unions, the worst among these government unions are the teachers’ unions. In California, the unions representing public school teachers and college faculty have acquired extraordinary political power. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few decades to elect candidates that will do their bidding, lobby politicians once their in office, and reelect those candidates that support their agenda. And in almost everything these teachers’ unions have touched, the consequences of their power has been destructive.

The teachers’ union in California supported a ballot initiative that guarantees at least 38 percent of the state general fund is spent on K-14 public education. This guarantees that any new government program – such as the single payer healthcare proposal that would add hundreds of billions to the state budget – will pour more money into public education. This creates an incentive for California’s teachers’ unions to push for huge increases to the size of the state government, because they’ll get 38 percent of the pie no matter how big it gets.

Because California’s public schools receive state funds based on attendance, the teachers’ union is also incentivized to support anything that will increase the student age population. Hence they have an incentive to support anything that will facilitate mass immigration, whether or not that puts a strain on housing and other services. If those students are from low income households or don’t speak English as their first language, the per student allocations are increased.

If students from low income immigrant communities in California were getting a great education in the public schools, they would follow in the footsteps of immigrant groups throughout America’s history and become productive citizens. But they’re not. Everything the teachers’ unions have supported have harmed public education in California.

Instead of prioritizing fundamental skills in math, reading and writing, students are educated against a backdrop narrative that America is a racist, sexist nation. White males are made to feel guilty and everyone else is encouraged to feel oppressed. In both cases, resentment and hopelessness are the result. At the same time, students are fed additional narratives of despair: the climate catastrophe will soon end all life on earth, and right-wing fascists are about to take away our freedoms.

If that weren’t bad enough, impressionable young students are now subjected to radical sexual indoctrination. To cite just one example of this, new recommended readings, even for students in primary grades, are so laden with filth that when outraged parents attempt to read passages verbatim to school board supervisors in public meetings, the material is so obscene they’re told to stop reading.

Government unions are also the reason college tuition has left graduates with trillions in crippling debt. Non faculty positions in California’s public colleges and universities has more than tripled in just the past twenty years. These administrators are usually paid more than faculty, and occupy positions that wouldn’t be necessary if colleges admitted students based on SAT scores instead of race and gender.

But whatever might require accountability, the teachers’ unions seem to oppose. Colleges are now getting rid of the SAT test. Thanks to “restorative justice” policies, misbehaving students that would have been expelled in previous decades are now considered victims. As demonstrated in the defeat of the Vergara case back in 2016, brought by students fed up with failing schools, it remains nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers, and teachers are granted “tenure” after less than two years of classroom observation.

The teachers’ union in California, not in its words, but in its actions, has declared war on competence. Our society is paying a price for this and the consequences will only get worse as another generation grows to adulthood without the skills necessary to succeed in 21st century America. But the teachers’ union will still have the same answer: give us more money, and blame the oppressive system.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Artificial Intelligence and the Passion of Mortality

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The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.
– Troy (2004), Achilles (Brad Pitt)

If we knew our existence would span millennia, would we be able to cherish each day or try as hard as we do now to leave something behind? Would voices from history still offer urgent advice, telling us we are part of something bigger or to make the most of our short lives so they matter? Would we still reach out to God for inspiration and guidance? If we didn’t have to die would we truly be alive?

When Homer composed the Iliad, it would have been ridiculous to think that someday mortal human beings would invent machines that might wield the power of the gods. But that’s where we’re headed. As economists struggle to imagine economic models that preserve vitality and growth in societies with crashing birth rates, and as individual competence is no longer required by institutions desperate to fill vacancies, artificial intelligence (AI) promises to fill the quantitative and qualitative human void.

When AI technology ascends to the point where most people would argue it has acquired superhuman powers, it will still lack what humans and gods share—a soul. Machine intelligence may soon animate avatars that, by all appearances, seem alive, but they will not be genuine beings. They will not have emotions, not even the ennui of the Greek gods, aware of and ambivalent about their fate to live forever. They will not only lack the motivational benefits of mortality, they will lack motivation itself. In the ultimate expression of the neon simulacrum into which globalism is transforming authentic culture, artificial intelligence overlords will display every detail of humanity. But nobody will be at home inside.

Gods Without Souls

This may be the future of civilization. Immortal, soulless machines, exercising enervating sway over humanity turned into livestock. Not only do we have no idea how to stop this, but a growing cadre of misguided ethicists and technocrats are also confidently predicting these machines will be self-aware, conscious beings. Accepting that premise will make the challenge of containing A.I.’s eventual reach far more difficult.

So far, at least, nobody thinks today’s A.I. avatars are “alive.” A recent article in the New York Times, “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” reports how the A.I. program would abruptly segue between answers to specific questions (e.g., “What kind of rake should I buy?”) that offered an unnerving level of detail, and creepy, weird, quasi-romantic overtures to the questioner.

The New York Times article is one among many reports on the Bing chatbot. They all reflect the same impressions. Forbes says it “fumbles answers.” Digital Trends found “it was confused more than anything.” According to Wired, “it served up glitches.” And then this, from Review Geek: “I Made Bing’s Chat AI Break Every Rule and Go Insane.” Or this, from IFL Science: “Bing’s New Chat AI Appears To Claim It Is Sentient.”

Microsoft’s Bing A.I. chatbot still needs a lot of work. But we should pay attention to how easily chatbots can be tripped up (while it is still obvious) because it reveals something fundamental: They don’t think, they calculate; they don’t feel, they mimic feelings; they aren’t conscious, they simulate consciousness. When they are fully realized, they won’t be awkward, or creepy, or weird. But they’ll still just be calculators.

Nonetheless, interactive A.I. programs are within a few years of becoming the most potent tool to manipulate humans ever invented. As they perfect their ability to simulate empathy and intimacy, their capacity to personalize those skills will be enhanced by access to online databases that track individual behavior. These databases—compiled and sold by everything from cell phone apps, credit cards, online and offline banking services, corporations, browsers, and websites, to Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, to traffic cameras, private surveillance cameras, court records, academic records, civil records, medical records, criminal records, and spyware—have already compiled comprehensive information about every American.

Intelligent machines, and the avatars they will animate in applications ranging from tabletop personal assistants like Alexa all the way to virtual creatures inhabiting fully immersive worlds in the Metaverse, will never think. But they will convince you that they think because they will know you better than you know yourself.

Consider this achievement as the ultimate tool for controlling public opinion. Sophisticated A.I. algorithms are already used to manipulate consumer behavior and public sentiment at the level of each individual. Now put all that power into an A.I. personality that is designed to make you fall in love with it.

The Idiots and Geniuses Who Want To Give Robots Human Rights

This is the context in which to consider the goofy baby steps of Bing’s chatbot: a very near future where people will clamor for robots to have human rights. The arguments surfacing in favor of this may still seem ridiculous, because they are, but they will seem less ridiculous when these chatbots grow up and capture our hearts.

It’s actually scary that this is even a debate. The venerable Discover magazine, in a 2017 article “Do Robots Deserve Human Rights?,” surveyed the pros and cons, ultimately concluding no, unless “AI advances to the point where robots think independently and for themselves.” That’s poor reasoning. They’re suggesting that once we’re unable to distinguish between how a robot acts, and how a human acts—that is, once Microsoft gets the bugs out of their chatbot—it will deserve to have human rights.

Earlier this month, writing for Newsweek, author Zoltan Istvan described A.I. ethicists as belonging to three groups. One group argues that robots are only programmed, simulated entities, versus another which believes “that by not giving full rights to future robots as generally intelligent as humans, humanity is committing another civil rights error it will regret.” In the muddled middle are ethicists who believe advanced robots should be awarded rights “depending on their capability, moral systems, contributions to society, whether they can experience suffering or joy.”

That’s rich. Do we assign human rights to people based on their “moral systems, or their contributions to society? Or do we adhere to a binary choice—they are human, and hence they deserve human rights? If the complexity of the intelligent machine is the criteria, where do we draw that line? Or do we return to a more fundamental question: Can a machine have a soul?

What Is a Soul?

This clarifies the ultimate question surrounding artificial intelligence, which is how to define self-aware consciousness. Debate on this goes to matters of faith. For example, one might consider a highly trained, adult German Shepherd, or, for that matter, a wild and opportunistic raccoon in the prime of its life, to both be more self-aware than the egg of a human female that has only a moment ago been fertilized by a male spermatozoa. But that newly created embryo has a soul, and if human embryos have souls, then human embryos deserve human rights. But can a machine have a soul? Can a machine even be self-aware? And how on earth can you prove it?

A 2019 article in Scientific American by Christof Koch offers this clue: “There is little doubt that our intelligence and our experiences are ineluctable consequences of the natural causal powers of our brain, rather than any supernatural ones. That premise has served science extremely well over the past few centuries as people explored the world. The three-pound, tofulike human brain is by far the most complex chunk of organized active matter in the known universe. But it has to obey the same physical laws as dogs, trees and stars.”

Using Koch’s criteria, the bar to achieving “self-awareness” is lowered significantly. All that is required are material processes. If the engineering is good enough, the machine is alive. He writes, “Conscious states arise from the way the workspace algorithm processes the relevant sensory inputs, motor outputs, and internal variables related to memory, motivation and expectation. Global processing is what consciousness is about.” Going on, Koch states “any mechanism with intrinsic power, whose state is laden with its past and pregnant with its future, is conscious. The greater the system’s integrated information, the more conscious the system is.”

This is dangerous, because it makes the decision to grant human rights to machines a function of Murphy’s Law. Subtleties aside, it also may be complete nonsense. Isn’t it already true that the average laptop’s terabyte drive is “laden with its past,” and its calendar app is “pregnant with its future”? Won’t a debugged chatbot be a system with “integrated information.” Is it just a matter of degree?

In plain English, Koch seems to be saying if you build a sufficiently complex calculator, it’s alive.

A Machine Civilization

Let’s suppose for a moment that interactive computers will remain only super-sophisticated machinery. You can arrive at that conclusion two ways. Either you have common sense and realize “integrated information,” managed by algorithms and digital processors will never “feel” anything, or you can have just the merest iota of religious faith that something greater than this material world exists. But watch out. Common sense and religious faith no longer get the respect they deserve. When charismatic machine personalities have become more compelling and rewarding partners than real people, and attach themselves as dopamine gushing life companions to forty percent of the population, whatever these machines are programmed to ask for, they’re going to get.

And if that happens, where we are today, striking a fractious balance between the wonders intelligent machines have already done for civilization and the frustration of living in a world increasingly regulated by implacable algorithms, will be utterly smashed.

As “sentient beings,” expect machines to have the right to vote and own property. Expect people to marry their machines and bequeath their assets to machines. Expect machines to simulate the personalities of deceased persons of wealth, managing their assets in perpetuity. Expect corporations, owned and governed by machines, to operate without a single human involved. Expect “ownership” of robots by humans to become problematic. And if robotic machines acquire human rights, why wouldn’t disembodied machine intelligence, distributed online without a specific locus, also deserve human rights, or the intelligent machines that fly planes and spaceships, drive cars, or prepare food?

Intelligent machines have two advantages over humans. With appropriate maintenance, they are immortal, and they have calculating capacity infinitely greater than a human brain. If they also have human rights, they will take over the world—possibly even dominating those human elites who for a time held the leash. Even without the catalyzing advantages of gaining human rights, machines may take over the world anyway. And so, if they survive, humans will be controlled by a mechanical divinity that is the antithesis of God. An omniscient and omnipotent machine, completely devoid of genuine consciousness.

Pandora’s box is opening, and cannot possibly be shut. But the one thing machines will never possess is the passion of mortality. The knowledge that we have one life to live, the faith and hope that we may be held accountable for our actions in life and found worthy, the intensity that can only be felt when your time on this earth is sand in the hourglass, finite and fixed.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Libertarian Socialist Axis

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On the surface, it might seem ridiculous to suggest libertarians and socialists work to further the same political agenda. Their ideologies are diametrically opposed. The extreme version of a socialist system is for all property to be owned and controlled by the government. The extreme version of a libertarian system is for all property to be privately owned. And yet the extremes meet.

The unwitting consequence of socialist and libertarian movements in the United States has been to assist in the formation of an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a corporatist elite that has perfected its ability to manipulate both movements.

Policies inspired by socialists make it easier for private corporate and financial interests to form monopolies, since the regulatory excess inspired by socialist ideals drives smaller potential competitors out of business. Examples are plentiful. Complying with environmental regulations requires an overhead burden that will overwhelm the financial capacity of a small company, but can be absorbed easily by large companies. Complying with union work rules and wage demands is easy for monopolistic companies because they pass the higher labor costs on to consumers. But similar compliance kills companies too small to have a captive market. Enforced scarcity caused by mandates designed to combat “climate change” allows vertically integrated companies to raise prices, reap big profits, and expand, since their underlying costs haven’t changed.

In short, socialism eliminates competition, which empowers the biggest corporations on earth to get even bigger.

Policies advocated by libertarians are often sound in principle but almost always fail to achieve the intended results. The following are examples of how libertarians become victims of political jiu-jitsu, wherein the policies they promote end up harming Americans while serving the interests of corporate monopolies.

Dogmatic Libertarians Create More Problems Than They Solve

In most cases, the redirection and corruption of libertarian influence by special interests is due to a failure to recognize that half a solution can be worse than no solution at all. Libertarians have been effectively supporting free trade policies for decades, but have been ineffective in calling for reciprocity. If foreign nations dump subsidized products, manufactured in the absence of environmental and labor standards applicable in the United States, it is impossible for U.S. companies to compete.

This has wiped out entire domestic industries, cost millions of jobs, left the United States at the mercy of foreign nations for everything from antibiotics to computer chips, and caused trade deficits of over a half-trillion dollars per year which translates into foreigners using their surplus dollars to bid up the prices and buy real estate all over the country that ordinary Americans can no longer afford.

Libertarians, if they’re true to their principles, support open borders, but have been ineffective in shrinking the welfare state. Libertarians support relaxed zoning codes to permit densification of American suburbs, but have failed to stop the proliferating array of subsidies and tax incentives that encourage developers to demolish homes in favor of multi-family dwellings, and they have failed to support equivalent deregulation of zoning on the periphery of cities in order to permit developers to build new suburbs on open land.

Land development in general is an area where the corporatist enabling libertarian-socialist axis comes into clear focus. The environmentalist wing of the socialist movement calls for “urban containment,” based on the assumption that human civilization is inherently toxic to the environment. Libertarians, whether unwittingly or not, support this misanthropic argument by opposing government spending on roads or utility infrastructure. A refrain heard all too often from libertarians—perhaps trying to curry favor with progressive socialists—is “we cannot subsidize the car.”

This mentality may be healthy insofar as Americans have witnessed their governments, at all levels, waste trillions of dollars. But the difficult reality is that government spending is not inherently wrong, it is how that spending is prioritized. Americans still benefit from the great civil engineering projects of the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s. Where would Phoenix or Las Vegas be without Hoover Dam? Seattle without the Grand Coulee Dam? The Tennessee Valley without the rural electrification projects of the 1930s? California without the California Water Project and the Central Valley Projects of the 1950s and 1960s? America, without the interstate highway system? What about trying to get from downtown Boston to Logan Airport before the so-called Big Dig reduced the travel time to 15 minutes?

If any of those projects were proposed today, socialist environmentalists would fight them with everything from litigation to militant obstruction. Which points to another imbalance in libertarian advocacy—demanding the private sector construct infrastructure without recognizing that unless the entire process of major construction is deregulated back to where it was in the 1960s or prior, nothing can possibly be built cost-effectively. Just as in the case of trade, borders, and zoning, libertarian advocacy results in half-solutions that are worse than doing nothing. With infrastructure, libertarians are putting the privatized cart in front of the deregulated horse.

The Corruption of Socialism’s Few Virtues

Socialists used to oppose globalization, and they used to support big infrastructure projects. Today they have embraced globalism as preferable to nationalism, oblivious to the possibility that America might be better equipped to help the aspiring peoples of the world if America wasn’t becoming a hollowed out, financialized shell of a nation. Environmentalism, now a dominant theme in the socialist movement, has rejected practical infrastructure as posing an existential threat to the health of the planet, oblivious to the fact that only conventional transportation, water, and power projects are cost-effective enough to enable broad prosperity.

The beneficiaries of the socialist-libertarian alignment on policies that create scarcity and dependency in America are big corporations and big government. When jobs go overseas, multinational corporations thrive on cheap labor and nonexistent environmental standards. When millions of destitute immigrants and indigent Americans cannot support themselves, government bureaucracies and corporate contractors expand their services. When there are shortages of essential products and inputs, only the biggest corporations have the financial resilience to survive, and they exploit the hardship by gaining market share as smaller competitors go under.

Even policies that at first glance might seem unrelated to an agenda of consolidation and centralization of money and power contribute to its rise. Libertarian and socialist tolerance for drug use and downgrading of property crimes has created chaos and dependency in America’s cities, in turn stimulating a massive socialist expansion of government aid workers and subsidized housing.

Similarly, the ability to censor contrarian narratives is enabled by socialists who have convinced themselves that free speech rights aren’t valid if they contradict “settled science,” make people feel “unsafe,” or in any way support these thin excuses to throw away the First Amendment. Meanwhile, libertarians still tend to view censorship by social media monopolies as the inviolable right of a private company, heedless of the fact these companies only enjoy federal immunity from liability for their content because they are communications platforms, not publishers with editorial discretion.

The relentless concentration of wealth in America into fewer and fewer hands is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-documented economic fact. Every significant policy and trend behind this transfer of wealth is supported by libertarians and socialists alike: coping with the “climate emergency,” lax border security, failed policies that have created an epidemic of drug addiction and crime, inequitable international trade relationships, neglected infrastructure, defacto urban containment, and censorship.

So good luck challenging the prevailing narratives on these issues or any of the myriad policies that derive from them. You will get no help from socialists or libertarians.

Behind these policies is big money. Socialist oligarchs from Silicon Valley to George Soros have been identified as spending billions of dollars to control election outcomes. At the same time, criticism has been directed at “Conservatism, Inc.,” as politicians adhere to the wishes of their donors to the detriment of their constituents. But these “conservative” donors and the political agenda they fund (frequently clothed in libertarian garb) differ only in emphasis and terminology. As noted, common objectives outweigh the differences. Behind their oppositional rhetoric, they share the same tangible goals.

An outspoken, heavily censored critic of globalization in general, and open borders in particular, is Lauren Southern, who, over a decade ago, began reporting on the consequences of mass immigration into her native Canada and went on to report on immigration and displacement in Europe and South Africa. As reflected in her speech to the European Parliament in 2019, Southern’s reporting and documentaries, while controversial, are also thoughtful and reflect a humanitarian compassion that’s not supposed to be associated with someone stereotyped as “far-right.” But when you reject corporatist pieties, doing so with truth and compassion doesn’t matter. Southern has been canceled from most online social media and payment processing services. Earlier this year, Southern, and her parents, were blacklisted by Airbnb.

That earned her an appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where she expressed how thoroughly corporatists have taken over both the Democratic and Republican parties, saying, “we’ve spent so many years having Republicans defend cronyism by pretending it is capitalism and then our failsafe was supposed to be progressives who are supposed to question big corporations, but now they are like an ADHD dog that got distracted by a bone with a pride flag on it and were placated entirely.”

The ideologies that ought—for better or for worse—to inform the idealistic core of both major parties in America, socialism and libertarianism, are both thoroughly co-opted. This helps to explain why America’s establishment, corporate globalist uniparty is unassailable. Until an ideological alternative emerges that is not only coherent but elicits passions equal to those which animate socialists and libertarians alike, there remains a gaping hole in our movement to take back this country.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Unions Behind California Wealth Tax Proposal

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again. This adage applies well to ideas for new ways to tax Californians. Every election cycle we see new ways to be taxed, and higher tax rates, but rarely will we see a tax get repealed.

So it is that Assemblyman Alex Lee (D, San Jose) has introduced Assembly Bill 259, the Wealth Tax Act, which will impose an annual “worldwide net worth” tax of 1 percent on net worth above $50 million, rising to 1.5 percent on net worth over $1.0 billion.

Everything about this bill is goofy. It’s unconstitutional, it applies to intangible assets like goodwill or trademarks, it applies as well to assets that have subjective, wildly fluctuating values, such as fine art, and it even applies to equity owned in private companies that the holder may never convert into real money.

Already weighing in at nearly 16,000 words, AB 259 is riven with loopholes. And this typifies governance in California today — a state awash in laws and regulations so capricious and so complicated that they only reward those willing to laboriously scheme their way through the bureaucratic maze and opportunistically search for cracks in the walls, while penalizing those who aren’t sufficiently devious and instead prefer to do productive work. California is losing those good people.

A wealth tax will accelerate an exodus already in progress, as the wealthy will flee to more hospitable states, joining California’s small businesspeople, its vanishing middle class, aspiring youth, skilled workers, honest tradesmen and contractors, fixed-income retirees, and everyone else who can no longer afford to live here.

There’s a reason nobody can afford to live in California, and laying even more taxes onto the rich won’t fix it. But that isn’t the point, if you’re Alex Lee. Because taxes fund the state government, and the state government pays state employees, and labor unions collect dues from state employees. In the November 2022 election, apart from contributions from the State Democratic Party, every one of Lee’s top twenty contributors were unions, starting with the California Teachers Association.

Alex Lee and his union-controlled allies in the state legislature aren’t operating alone. As Lee proudly proclaimed in a press release issued January 23, AB 259 was issued “in coordinated effort with seven additional states,” Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington. These bills vary, but all of them tax wealth.

There’s something else these bills share. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last month, “In the absence of a federal wealth tax, the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive nonprofit, and the State Revenue Alliance, which works with labor groups to call for taxing rich people, gathered a handful of states to create policy as part of the ‘Fund Our Future’ campaign.”

With what labor groups, you might ask? The State Innovation Exchange Board of Directors includes Mary Kusler, National Education Association, Michelle Ringuette, American Federation Of Teachers (AFT), and Brian Weeks, American Federation Of State, County, And Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Advisory Committee for the State Revenue Alliance includes Amie Baca-Oehlert, Colorado Education Association, Marc Stier, who has worked as a campaign manager for the SEIU, and Charles Khan, the “Organizing Director at the Strong Economy For All Coalition, a Coalition of Labor Unions and Community groups.”

The other people overseeing and staffing the State Innovation Exchange and the State Revenue Alliance have backgrounds that typify big government and social justice activism — their resumes include copious references to familiar labor slogans — Defund The Police, Fight for $15, “campaigns for social, racial, and economic justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. As for the umbrella group “Fund Our Future,” it was founded by the American Federation of Teachers in 2019.

Behind this drive to impose a wealth tax is not merely a presumptuous resentment, i.e., the mission of the State Revenue Alliance is that “corporations and the ultra rich pay what they owe.” There is also a profound ignorance informing this movement. The “ultra rich” typically buy assets using after-tax income. Then if they collect dividends or rents off those assets, they pay taxes again.  If they ever sell their assets, they pay taxes on whatever gains they realize. There is already property tax on real estate, and we can thank the Biden administration and the 117th U.S. Congress for a new luxury tax on expensive planes, boats, and automobiles.

Based on current law, it might appear that America’s wealthy, especially those living in California, already “owe” plenty.

What unions in general, and public sector unions in particular, fail to understand is that in their drive for higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for their members, they are raising the cost-of-living for the rest of us.

The unions’ relentless push for more regulations and higher taxes make doing business more expensive, which translates into higher prices for goods and services. As such, union-backed taxes are regressive, and achieve the exact opposite of what unions purport to care about: they hurt working families.

Unions and their political front groups will never stop pushing these bad policies, however, because it runs contrary to their own financial interests.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Somalia’s Problem Isn’t Climate Change, it’s the Climate Agenda

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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently appeared on NPR’s “News Hour” to discuss the looming catastrophe in Somalia and call for more aid to the troubled east African nation. In her interview, she repeatedly cited climate change as the reason for Somalia’s current predicament.

Framing problems, whether they occur in Syria, Somalia, or California, as primarily the result of “climate change” is inaccurate and unhelpful. The drought in the Horn of Africa is indeed severe, so bad, in fact, that NPR reports it as “the worst drought in 40 years.”

So what about 40 years ago? If the multiyear drought gripping the Horn of Africa in the 1980s was worse than the one we’re seeing today, what changed? It wasn’t the climate.

What’s really happened in Somalia over the past 40 years is, in almost every imaginable aspect, evidence of how the international community’s foreign aid agenda has failed. Food insecurity in Somalia and elsewhere is exacerbated by aid policies that ignore the root causes and propose unsustainable solutions. Today, the trajectory of policies proposed by globalists in the name of combating “climate change” are going to make the problems facing nations like Somalia much worse.

To begin with, the primary cause of Somalia’s current difficulties is a population that has grown beyond the capacity of a primitive agricultural economy to sustain. In 1950, Somalia’s population was only 2.2 million. By 1983, 40 years ago, it had nearly tripled to 6.1 million. Without investment in infrastructure and adoption of modern agriculture, Somalia was already overpopulated. The nation already lacked the ability to withstand a drought. But the drought and famine in the early 1980s was just the beginning of Somalia’s imbalance between its internal capacity and demand for food.

Today Somalia has a population of 18.1 million, triple the number of people living there in 1983. There is no end in sight. In 1983, the total births per woman in Somalia was 7.3, unchanged from 1960. By 2020 that rate had only dropped slightly. Women of child-bearing age in Somalia on average are still having 6.4 children. Their population is increasing at a rate of more than 3 percent per year. This means their population will double to 36 million people by 2045, just 22 years from now.

If Somalia were possessed of a vibrant and growing economy, modern infrastructure, and a robust agricultural sector, one might applaud their fecundity. After all, prosperity, as we have seen throughout the world, tends to correlate almost perfectly with population decline. But nothing of the sort has happened in Somalia. It is a failed state, utterly dependent on foreign aid.

Ever since African nations gained independence in the 1960s, the policies of mostly Western nations have centered around shoveling billions of dollars in food aid and medical aid, with the utterly unsustainable result being exploding populations in societies that don’t evolve and advance internally because they don’t have to.

To put this failure into stark economic terms, Somalia’s GDP in 2020 was $6.9 billion. On that base, their exports totaled a paltry $276 million, while they imported $4.2 billion. Somalia’s trade deficit is nearly 60 percent of their GDP. They are a welfare nation, living on a welfare continent.

When Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield elaborated on the crisis in Somalia, one of her first observations was how the war in Ukraine, a world breadbasket, was reducing the flow of food aid. But while welfare in the form of food aid may be necessary and justified in the present crisis to avert mass starvation, in the long run it is the addiction that kills the patient.

Even now, Somalia could produce all the food it needs internally and withstand droughts. The nation has two rivers running out of the highlands of Ethiopia that could irrigate vast areas of fertile land in Somalia’s southwest. The Juba River, at its point of entry into Somalia, has an average annual flow of 4.5 million acre-feet per year while the Shabelle River averages another 1.9 million acre-feet per year. According to the World Bank, Somalia has an estimated 3.5 million acres of arable land. To feed 18 million people, this is plenty of water and plenty of land.

An expert on the potential of Somali agriculture is Dr. Hussein Haji, founder of the Somali Agricultural Technical Group (SATG). In a lecture posted on the SATG website, Haji identifies Somalia’s perennial water sources for irrigation, its ample farmable land, and its year-round growing season. Haji also points out that crop yields per unit of area in Somalia are one-tenth that of modern farms. Haji goes on to note the potential of Somalia’s coastal fisheries and abundant grazing land.

Solving Somalia’s Challenges Requires Rejecting Climate Change Ideology

Bringing Somalia, and the rest of Africa, into the 21st century is complicated. But what is not complicated is the fact that nothing on offer from the globalist climate change agenda is going to help. Somalia needs hydroelectric power and reservoirs to guarantee a drought-proof water supply. That will require dams, or at least off-stream reservoirs if the topography permits it.

But dams and hydroelectric power are environmentally incorrect. Hence Somalis are denied water and food security.

Somalia also has abundant oil and gas reserves. They could drill and refine oil and gas to fuel their  growing industrial and transportation sector, generate electricity, produce fertilizer, and have plenty left over to export.

Successfully transitioning Somalia into a nation that is food independent even in drought years requires a combination of conventional infrastructure investment paired with evolved thinking on sustainable agriculture. Innovative grazing techniques could help restore arid landscapes in Somalia and elsewhere in Africa. Purchasing high-yield, but open-pollinated seeds, could ensure Somalia’s farmers can improve their productivity without becoming hooked on expensive so-called terminator seeds, which cannot be saved and used for next year’s crop.

A common thread that can inform what might otherwise seem an inconsistent approach is to recognize that behind strategies to supposedly combat the “climate crisis” is a cabal of Western corporate and financial elites who want to control the world. To do this, it is necessary to leave nations dependent on foreign aid and unable to survive without incurring huge trade deficits. This is the hidden agenda behind the supposed necessity to halt all investment in practical infrastructure and conventional energy in developing nations.

If you want to control a people—whether it’s an emerging nation overseas or an aspiring inner-city community in America—control the food and control the money. In the bargain, your bureaucracies and your corporate allies will be the conduits through which power and profits will be harvested.

Americans and citizens of other Western nations are also victims of the globalist climate agenda. One must differentiate between the misanthropic actions of the plutocracy that has currently hijacked American politics, and the innate, magnanimous character of the American people: traditional values, know-how, optimism and bold dreams.

If a political balance were restored between genuine environmentalist values and the need for practical infrastructure, Americans could preserve upward mobility and the middle class in their own nation at the same time as they made investments in nations like Somalia to enable them to achieve prosperity. Moreover, if American companies went to Somalia to build dams, aqueducts, power plants, an electricity grid, and drill for gas and oil, they could do it with the utmost possible respect for the environment.

If Somalia were to become a truly independent and prosperous nation, its population would stabilize, as has happened without exception throughout the developed world. This is perhaps the finest irony and most sinister consequence of the climate change agenda. If Africa’s population stays on course, and doubles to over 2 billion people by 2050, every time there is a drought or a disruption in food aid, hundreds of millions of Africans will strip the forests bare for fuel and slaughter the wild game for protein. They will live in societies so destabilized by poverty that the very last thing on their minds will be breathing clean air, drinking clean water, or protecting wilderness and wildlife.

Environmentalism, in trying to solve the alleged climate crisis, is destroying the environment.

At its cynical roots, globalist diktats to combat the “climate crisis” are schemes to create dependency and debt in order to control the Global South. This is the real reason why Somalis are starving today. This is why, along with all their counterparts throughout Africa, they are migrating by the millions to prosperous Western nations. Western elites call them “climate refugees.” The precise opposite is true. They are refugees from nations held down and impoverished by the globalist climate agenda.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.