I recently saw a young wive frantically frolicking and waving in the surf as her husband ignored her to take pictures of stray dogs on the beach. While that may not be the saddest thing I've ever seen, it certainly ranks in the top ten.

I posted this eslewhere and liked it so much a put it here

I'm a SoCal native and still love the state, though not the politics. Just a few observations outside of the narrative that most Californians and outsiders seem to share about the state:

* CA has been on the federal payroll since WWII. Much of its wealth was due to the many defense industries (and bases) that dotted the same coastal areas that the liberal spending class now occupies (perhaps they got a bit spoiled). Watching the defense industry shrink over the decades has been like watching a diabetic get various appendages hacked off -- painful to watch and even more painful to contemplate the the next one. CA was able to afford so much infrastructure that other states couldn't because of all of those federal dollars flooding in. We cannot even afford to maintain that infrastructure at today's levels of defense dollar inflows.

* Direct democracy will lead to the ruin of the polity and society. Many commentators here and elsewhere blame Sacramento. Sacramento is a cesspit, I agree. But so much of our spending is mandated by the hundreds of laws and "constitutional amendments" that we the people have enacted through our easy to use initiative system. If I was king of California for a day, my sole act would be to make every eligible voter to turn out and vote yeah or nay for Proposition 1: The initiative system is hereby abolished." California is PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores.

* Almost all of you are underestimating the effect of illegal immigrants on the school system. How do you take a bunch of kids whose parents grew up without even a high school education (and who may in fact associate education with belonging to the hated Mexican upper classes) and motivate them to do well in school? The answer is that you will not. The reality is that areas that have low concentrations of first through second generation Hispanics the schools are nationally competitive. Teachers unions ain't got much to do with it (the problem they cause is pension debt). Bottom line is that illegal immigration is destroying our schools, hospitals, police departments, and even the "voluntary associations" that are the foundation of civic life.

* Proposition 13 was a failure. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then going hungry is proof that the pudding doesn't exist. Given the state budget disaster, I'd say only the most hardheaded could say that Prop 13 worked. What Prop 13 really did was to transfer the spending from cities and counties to Sacramento. This had three very bad second-order effects:
1. Sacramento gained more power and became even more corrupt.
2. The cities and counties became ever more dependent on Sacramento to pay the bills and on Sacramento's ability to borrow more than they could ever hope to at better rates.
3. The cities and counties and their voters became hopelessly detached from reality. Since the Sacramento was paying a lot of their bills with cheaply borrowed money, they had no clue. Before Prop 13, if a municipality had a money shortfall, the sewers didn't get laid or the schools didn't get built. Afterward, Tio Sacramento simply bailed them out.

My advice: Get rid of the initiative system, re-boot the state constitution to get rid of all the garbage the initiatives put in there (many of you would fret that the liberals would muck it up; I suspect that adopting the old Soviet constitution might be an improvement at this point... that's how hopeless the current document is!), and give tax power back to the cities and counties and limit Tio Sacramento's greatly. Some cities and counties will have high taxes. Some won't. The good thing is that in every single election, the voters will have their noses rubbed in reality and will have to deal with it. I'm not even going near the illegal immigration problem. That's a book, not a blog post.

Pontiff of pulchitrude

In addition to all the other criticism of Krugman's latest screed on the post WWII recovery, I would like to add that perhaps some of the reasons that the U.S. did so well in the immediate post-war years was that we had bombed to rubble the cities of two of our main competitors, the UK was virtually bankrupt, and the rest of the industrialized world was either on the verge of starvation (ever hear of the Marshall Plan?) or was now behind the Iron Curtain (and Uncle Joe was very big on autarky). Thus for about ten or fifteen years, the U.S. enjoyed an enormous economic advantage over all other competitors. Unless we want to gratuitously nuke China, big chunks of the rest of Asia, and the EU, there is no evidence that we will be able to repeat that performance.