California responsible for its own mess

Seven Greenhut:

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Despite efforts by a prominent left-of-center California think tank to show that California businesses aren't leaving the state in droves, California businesses are expanding elsewhere. Corporate executives might prefer keeping the headquarters in picture-perfect San Diego or Irvine or San Jose rather than moving it to in dusty El Paso or swampy Houston, but they aren't creating many new jobs here. Who can blame them?

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Even California's government retirees are fleeing for all parts of the inter-mountain West, where they can enjoy their six-figure pensions and not have to put up with all the high taxes, high cost of living and other hassles....

Entrepreneurs go into the private sector, where they take risks, innovate, and create jobs and fortunes. The private sector fills the public sector's coffers with cash, whereas the public sector burns through the money on its endless commissions and high salaries, runs up billions of dollars in unfunded retirement liabilities, complains that it can't do its job because of tough economic times, and then demands higher taxes. Bad businesses go belly up. Bad bureaucracies never go away and they always lobby for more money. This is how it has always been in all countries and states.

Texas has many flaws, but at least the leaders there seem to understand the importance of private investment and the limits on government. It's sad, in a way, that California leaders need to make such a trek to remind themselves of those simple, timeless lessons, and that I even need to devote a column raising these obvious points.

We all know how government operates. In 2006, the Register reported on how Caltrans became the state's biggest slumlord.

The road-building agency used eminent domain to acquire thousands of properties for roads it never built, then let the properties rot. As one Register reporter put it recently, this is "a story about how the nation's largest freeway builder neglected its massive land holdings, creating blight and despair. It was about how Caltrans kept properties off the tax rolls, draining county coffers of tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues. It was a about abuse of power."

Now, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, we learn that Caltrans has been spending absurd sums of money putting new roofs on these old properties, spending many multiples of what such a roof would cost on the open market. In one case, the agency spent more than $171,000 for a roof on a decrepit, vacant house.

This is how government operates....

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It comes from the high cost of liberal inefficiencies. Liberalism is the most expensive form of government and that would be true if they eliminated all the waste inherent in liberal government. California is still embracing liberalism, but the codependency has not served it well.