California Dreaming... aah, shouldn't that be, "California Dying"

Source: PoliGazette

Churchill, deTocqueville, Prejean, and the Suicide of California

By: Jason Arvak

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said that the best cure for democracy is five minutes with the average voter.

Boy was he right, at least if that voter is Californian.

In a remarkable act of fiscal suicide, California’s voters have used the state’s unusual direct democracy provisions to essentially close off all options for dealing with their looming fiscal crisis. The state government is disallowed from raising taxes, cutting spending, or using reserve funds. And President Obama has joined with the public employee unions to say double-no on spending cuts.

Observing a young American experiment in democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the greatest danger to democracy would arise when the mass of people realized they could vote themselves the benefit of the public treasury while refusing to pay for it. That seems to be exactly what is happening in California. With a strong majority of Democrats in the state legislature and bureaucracy, California has long been a profligate spender. Large and well-organized blocs of interest groups have succeeded in enacting one of the largest systems of entitlements outside of northern Europe. But a backlash cohort led by isolated fiscal conservatives succeeded in the 1980s in imposing requirements for a two-thirds majority in the legislature to authorize any tax increases.

Do the math: It requires only a majority to authorize spending increases, but a two-thirds majority to pay the bills. That is a recipe for disaster. Layer on the apparent stupidity of the median California voter (the pejorative descriptor “stupidity” being justified by the apparent fact that they cannot do the math), and we no have that recipe in the mixing bowl with the oven pre-heating.

For the last several weeks, liberals have been shouting that the stupidest thing to come out of California was Carrie Prejean. It seems a few of them need to look in a mirror for a better example. And some of the conservatives who have been singing the praises of Prejean’s genius need to somehow show themselves superior to beauty-queen-level logic when paying the state’s bills.

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