Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future
by Peter SchragBy Nick Gillespie, Senior Editor, Reason Magazine
(This review is adapted from the article "California Dreaming," which appears in the December 1998 issue of Reason. The full article is available at http://www.reason.com, or by calling 310-391-2245.)
In Paradise Lost, Peter Schrag frets that California is no longer a truly livable place, an arguable decline he largely-and unconvincingly --attributes to the state's robust ballot initiative process. That he fails to make his case should be of great interest to public policy mavens far beyond the borders of his home state.
The Golden State, argues Schrag, a former editorial page editor for the Sacramento Bee, was once a "model and magnet for the nation--in its economic opportunities, its social outlook, and its high-quality public services and institutions." Now, he submits in alternately wistful and angry tones, California "is no longer the progressive model in its public institutions and services, or in its social ethic, that it once was." Indeed, the situation is so extreme that Schrag creates a readily understood, if hyperexaggerated, neologism-"Mississippification"-to describe the process that he believes is taking place.
For Schrag, California's demise is identical to what he considers the ruin of its public sector. He quotes a 1939 WPA Guide (of all sources) to the effect that once residents felt a "personal pride in the State's gargantuan public works: highways, bridges, dams and aqueducts" and points to 1959-67 reign of Gov. Edmund (Pat) Brown as the "high point" and "Golden Moment" of the place--a "stunning run" when the government literally moved mountains, built one college campus after another, and never let a lack of funds stop it from writing a check.
Now, says Schrag, Californians have been evicted from Eden. The underfunded public schools are no good anymore; the freeways are in disrepair; public libraries have shortened their hours if not shut their doors altogether; and "the state's social benefits, once among the nation's most generous, have been cut, and cut again, and then cut again."
The snake in the grass of Schrag's paradise is the ballot initiative process. This is no easy admission for the author, who, as a professed admirer of populist reformers, notes in passing that California's initiative law, passed in 1911, is itself "a Progressive Era instrument whereby 'the people' could from time to time check the excesses of a state government." For Schrag, the fall from grace began in earnest with the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, which capped property tax rates at 1 percent of assessed valuation, stipulated that assessed valuation can rise no more than 2 percent annually, and mandated that local special taxes and bond measures need a two-thirds vote to pass.
Prop. 13, writes Schrag, "set in motion not merely the holy crusade against taxes in which much of the country now seems irretrievably stuck, but a condition of permanent neopopulism in California .... California has been in nearly constant revolt against representative government. [Since Prop. 13], voters have passed one initiative after another--tax limitation intiatives; initiatives capping state and local spending; measures imposing specified minimum spending formulas for schools; term limits for legislative and statewide offices; three-strikes sentencing laws; land conservation measures; the measures abolishing affirmative action in public education, contracting, and employment, and seeking to deny public schooling and other services to illegal immigrants, and dozens of others--each of them mandating or prohibiting major programs and policies, or imposing supermajority requirements."
While Schrag is correct to note that ballot initiatives are an extremely blunt political instrument--and that some of the campaigns have appealed to voters' baser instincts--he never convincingly demonstrates why initiatives are somehow less representative of the voters' will than a state legislature that he himself recognizes is just as easily captured by special interests. Similarly, he doesn't bother to explain why requiring a two-thirds majority for tax increases is a bad thing.
More specifically, his condemnation of Prop. 13 for killing public-sector spending is not particularly convincing: In fact, the total state tax burden has more than doubled since the early '60s and state per-capita spending in real dollars has more than tripled. Between 1991 and 1996 alone, state spending rose from $38 billion to $50 billion in constant dollars. And, as Schrag points out, in 1997, 26 of 38 school bond measures passed the two-thirds standard enacted by Prop. 13. That such spoils are not spent wisely or efficiently is an argument against public-sector spending, not evidence that it does not exist.
In the end, Schrag is railing against the end of the Big Government era, against the recognition that governments cannot indefinitely tax and spend. This is, of course, a development that ranges far beyond California's borders (debates about the need to reduce the social-welfare state have even emerged in such Old World strongholds as France and Germany). But Schrag seems manifestly uninterested in doping out the long-term connection between public spending and the private sector that ultimately pays for such largess, other than to assert that Californians are not now and never been "overtaxed." (He is similarly uninterested in considering the ways in which the welfare state intensifies social fragmentation by pitting special interest groups, often constituted along racial, ethnic, and class lines, against one another in a struggle for tax money and special treatment.)
Schrag's virtually complete lack of interest in California's private sector is perhaps the ultimate failing of Paradise Lost. His Eden, it seems, is purely a public-works project. Such an emphasis is more than a little misguided, for it has always been the jobs and work opportunities California offered that, at rock bottom, drew people West and fired their imaginations.