California’s Budget Crisis Is Not a Revenue Problem — It Is a Spending Problem That Revenue Increases Will Perpetuate

Analysis: Every California Tax Increase Has Been Followed by Spending Growth That Eliminated the Budget Improvement

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

California’s Budget Crisis Is Not a Revenue Problem — It Is a Spending Problem That Revenue Increases Will Perpetuate

CALIFORNIA — The spirit of the wave and the spirit of liberty share something essential: both require the freedom to move, to choose your line, to take the drop on your own terms without a bureaucrat on the shore telling you which break is permitted and which is subject to an environmental impact review that will be completed eighteen months after the season ends. California’s surfers have always understood, intuitively, what libertarian political philosophy argues from first principles: that individual freedom is the condition for human flourishing, that government overreach destroys the spontaneous order that free people create, and that the best things in life — including the best waves — cannot be planned by committees.

The specific issue of California budget illustrates this broader truth in the California context. The state that gave the world surfing culture, startup culture, and the mythology of individual reinvention has also given the world regulatory overreach, housing markets destroyed by zoning restrictions, a tax burden that drives productive people away, and a political class that believes it can legislate its way to prosperity rather than simply getting out of the way of the people who would create it.

The California budget Problem and the Libertarian Solution

The libertarian analysis of California budget in California begins with the question that most political analysis skips: what would free people voluntarily choose, absent government coercion? The answer, in most cases, is not the same thing that Sacramento mandates. Free markets, when allowed to function without political distortion, produce outcomes that better match the preferences of the people they serve than central planning does. This is not ideology. It is the accumulated evidence of every comparison between market and planned economies in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Reason Foundation has documented California’s regulatory burden extensively, tracking how specific regulations impose costs that exceed their benefits, restrict economic activity without improving the outcomes they target, and accumulate into a burden that makes California increasingly uncompetitive with states that have maintained more business-friendly environments. The Cato Institute‘s Freedom Index consistently ranks California among the least free states in the nation. The Mises Institute provides the economic theoretical framework for understanding why: when government substitutes political decision-making for market coordination, it destroys the price signals and entrepreneurial feedback loops that allow economies to adapt, improve, and serve human needs.

The Surfer’s Perspective

A surfer waiting for the right wave knows something that the central planner does not: the information required to make a good decision is distributed, local, and real-time. No one can tell you from Sacramento whether this is the right moment to paddle. You know. The market knows. The bureaucracy doesn’t. The same principle applies to housing, to business licensing, to environmental management, to the hundred other domains where California’s government has substituted its judgment for the judgment of free individuals with better information and better incentives. The rebellion of the surfer is the rebellion of the individual against the pretension of authority without knowledge. It is a beautiful rebellion. It is the foundation of the libertarian tradition. California needs more of it.

Mother’s Day Freedom

Today is Mother’s Day. The California mothers who are also surfers are at the beach this morning, which is where they want to be, doing what they want to do, which is the libertarian condition. The mothers who are being kept from their preferred activities by government restrictions on access, by permit requirements for beach events, by the accumulated regulatory architecture that California has built around the simplest human pleasures — they are the argument for every libertarian reform proposal in one clear example. Freedom is not a political position. It is a human requirement. Happy Mother’s Day, California. The ocean is free. The rest of California is working on it.

More satire: https://newsthump.com

The structural dimensions of this analysis require sustained attention. The intersection of political economy, institutional design, and individual decision-making produces outcomes that are neither inevitable nor accidental. Policy choices made by identifiable actors in identifiable institutions, shaped by identifiable interests, have produced the current situation. Understanding which actors, which institutions, and which interests are determinative is the analytical work that serious journalism is obligated to perform. The sources cited in this analysis represent a fraction of the documented evidence available for readers who wish to pursue the underlying material. The conclusions drawn are supported by that evidence and should be evaluated against it. The issues at stake affect millions of people whose ability to participate in democratic deliberation about those issues depends on access to journalism that takes their interests seriously and reports with the rigor and depth that their circumstances deserve.

The structural dimensions of this analysis require sustained attention. The intersection of political economy, institutional design, and individual decision-making produces outcomes that are neither inevitable nor accidental. Policy choices made by identifiable actors in identifiable institutions, shaped by identifiable interests, have produced the current situation. Understanding which actors, which institutions, and which interests are determinative is the analytical work that serious journalism is obligated to perform. The sources cited in this analysis represent a fraction of the documented evidence available for readers who wish to pursue the underlying material. The conclusions drawn are supported by that evidence and should be evaluated against it. The issues at stake affect millions of people whose ability to participate in democratic deliberation about those issues depends on access to journalism that takes their interests seriously and reports with the rigor and depth that their circumstances deserve.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/