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Restoring the California Dream
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Living at the edge of California’s Gold Country, I’m often astounded by the entire enterprise — the idea that people flocked here from across the globe to extract gold from the hills and try to make a quick fortune. The resulting lawlessness and violence can’t be overlooked, but nearby historic boom towns — Angel’s Camp, Placerville, Grass Valley, and even Sacramento — are testaments to the enduring communities that sprung up in the Gold Rush’s wake.
“The gold of California was not under private ownership,” wrote the late historian Kevin Starr in California: A History. “It belonged to everyone, provided one could find it, lay legal claim to it, extract it and get it safely to one or the other of the many assay centers that were now springing up where nuggets could be weighed, valued and melted into ingots for shipment to San Francisco and New York.” It’s quite a story and I highly recommend a trip along Highway 49.
The idea of the California Dream has long been celebrated in these parts, even though, to quote Starr again, “[T]he dream outran the reality, as it always does.” I became a California dreamer late in the game, moving to Orange County from the Midwest in the late 1990s long after the idea had become tarnished. By that time, the new progressive era — as opposed to the earlier one led by Gov. Hiram Johnson — was coming into its own.
The mood in the late 1990s was perhaps best defined by the official state approach to the sesquicentennial, which should have been a triumphant fête of California’s history. “California’s efforts to celebrate its 150th birthday have been drowned by bad management, politics and apathy,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the “state government has officially backed away from celebrating its own birthday.”
Three decades earlier, California had built the infrastructure for a booming future. Democratic Gov. Pat Brown — despite losing reelection to Ronald Reagan in 1966 — is revered more by Republicans than Democrats these days. His “sweeping successes” included making “the state’s public college and university system the best in the world, the building of highways and … the ‘most significant public water project in world history,’” per a KPBS retrospective.
In the 1970s, California soared again mostly as the result of the private sector. While the rest of the country was suffering through malaise, Southern California became the center of the defense and aerospace industries, the tech industry emerged in Silicon Valley, the wine industry took off in Sonoma and Napa, the Hollywood film industry become the world leader, and our ports became the hubs of international trade, explained author Francis J. Gavin.
I found Gavin’s following summary most revealing: “The Silicon Valley experience also transformed how innovation was encouraged and financed, with the rise of venture capital and the new start-up culture. A culture of entrepreneurship, which celebrated risk and tolerated failure, took hold. The consequences for America’s power position in the world was undeniable.” The key to California’s success, from the Gold Rush to modern times, had always been its spirit of entrepreneurship and private investment.
In the ensuing years, California’s leaders came to disdain the private sector, seeing it mainly as something to regulate, tax, and sue. They expanded government at every opportunity, and not mainly to build the kind of infrastructure projects championed by Pat Brown. Our recent leaders — and starting really with Pat’s son Jerry’s early terms as governor — have purposefully disinvested in freeways, water projects, and the like. We still have vaunted industries, but many of them are leaving.
So here we are. I often detail the myriad problems facing our once-great state — including a crime wave, exploding homeless population, a housing affordability crisis, and traffic congestion. California officials seem far more concerned about changing the entire Earth’s climate than they are about addressing their fundamental responsibilities in their own state. For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article, voters have given them license.
Consider this recent summary from the Legislative Analyst’s Office: “Since the beginning of 2022, the state’s labor markets have grown modestly but shown some signs of weakness. A closer look at this period unveils a more worrisome trend: large and mounting private-sector job losses that have been offset by continued hiring in public sector (and publicly supported) fields.” Over that period, the private sector has lost a net 154,000 jobs and the public sector has gained 361,000 jobs.
It’s almost as if our leaders believe the government is the key to prosperity. As President-elect Donald Trump prepares a new administration (which poses its own challenges to the free market), Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta are preparing the state to fight against federal GOP policies. This isn’t entirely inappropriate. Just as Texas geared up to fight Biden administration mandates, California will at times have to fight Trump’s efforts.
“The problem is that this is an exclusively defensive approach to solving a grassroots problem that will outlast Trump’s second term,” wrote Carlsbad business owner Bob Stonebrook in a commentary for CalMatters. “A far better and proactive approach — and one that would significantly increase the benefit to all Californians over the long haul — is to improve the effectiveness of our state government.”
That’s exactly right. Instead of taking the same partisan approach (and one that rarely amounts to more than political posturing), what if our state committed itself to returning to its former glory and becoming a model for good governance? What if state officials got serious about fixing our problems, reforming wasteful bureaucracies, lowering taxes, and improving the business climate?
Given the enduring appeal of California’s geography, culture, and weather, it’s not wrong to think it might spark a new Gold Rush.
Steven Greenhut is Western Region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
READ MORE:
Lessons From a Previous Trade War
California Voters Reject ‘California Values’
The post Restoring the California Dream appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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