Paul Marks sees the rotting effects of increasingly authoritarian statism on both coasts of the USA
New York City has been known as the heart of statism in the United States since the late 1930’s. However, in recent decades the State of California (or rather its rulers) have been keen to overtake New York in statism.
New York State still (by some measures at least) manages to just have higher taxes than California (although I doubt that New York State is still ahead in terms of state spending as a proportion of average income), but in terms of regulations California is well ahead, and in terms of the practices of the courts California has (in some ways) the worst legal system in the United States.
Statist Californian cities (most notably Los Angeles and San Francisco) are handicapped in their race to have higher taxes than New York City by the fact that so much is centralised in California – but they do their best, and in terms of regulations are in many ways ahead of New York City in statism.
Why I am going over this well known and rather sad story? Well there have been recent developments in the race to collapse.
California has decided to ban home schooling (at least parents will now need to be qualified teachers) – this should increase the government education budget (in a state that is heading for bankruptcy anyway) and reduce the standard of education.
Not to be outdone, New York City is banning smoking in restaurants, bars and so on that seat under 35 people (smoking is already banned in establishments that seat 35 people or more) – all this is a direct aping of Californian regulations. New York City already has the highest taxes on tobacco in the country (much to the joy of organised crime). Both the anti smoking regulations and the higher taxes are the brain children of the new ‘Republican’ Mayor (both New York City and New York State have a long tradition of ‘Republicans’ of this sort).
Is the race to collapse intentional? I do not think so. Although the Greens and other small groups (stronger in California than in New York State) really do want collapse, mainstream Democrats and Republicans do not. However, intentions will not change results (objective reality sees to that).
Which area will collapse first? I simply do not know. New York City has already gone bankrupt once (during the mid 1970’s), and been bailed out (in return for some fiscal responsibility) by New York State and the United States government, I suppose history could simply repeat itself.
California may simply be too big for such a bailout, especially as the national (and world) economy goes into decline next year (unless there is an oil price collapse of course). A Californian collapse should finally get people’s attention focused on the fact that statism does not work.
However, academia and the media will work hard to prevent people drawing this conclusion. We can expect lots of articles and TV interviews from the likes of Paul Krugman on the lines of “the collapse of this symbol of capitalism proves that laissez-faire does not work”.
At least in the United States the TV networks (although utterly dominated by ‘liberals’) still feel the need to sometimes have people on screen arguing against the statist account of an event – they are not quite on the level of British television.
Paul Marks
