Californiarchy

You may not be interested in California, but California is interested in you. That’s the concern, anyway. Like hundreds of thousands of others, I fled east when my home state was rendered unlivable by COVID-19 lockdowns and the George Floyd riots. But my recurring nightmare is that the myriad Californian dysfunctions which predate 2020—the glut of illegal immigrants and the consequent breakdown of law and public institutions, the traffic-choked roadways, the crumbling infrastructure, the sprawling tent cities where addicts and psychotics languish in their own filth—will bleed outward across the rest of the country. I fear California will catch up to me.

It would have become still harder than it already is to shake the state’s ravenous Tax Board had the legislature passed A.B. 2088, which would have institutionalized siphoning money from escapees for up to ten years after their departure. As it is, residents and even some emigrants-in-progress suffer under a crushing tax burden. If current Governor Gavin Newsom is not replaced by the upcoming recall election, or if he is replaced by someone equally hare-brained, that money will continue to buy more dysfunction at an ever-steeper price. “To fund all its very-expensive-yet-still-lousy services, the state really needs your money,” writes former Trump official Michael Anton in The Stakes (2020), an account of California’s decline and its prospects for national metastasis.

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