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John Robson: California is a mess. And wishing it otherwise won't change anything

Repeat after me: 'In 2022 I will not mistake wishes for horses'

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Here’s something we could definitely dispense with in the New Year, along with those extra pounds and, ahem, the habit of recycling resolutions: News stories that say wishing something would happen is tantamount to making it happen.

For instance this news alert email from NBC with the subject line “Showdown shapes up in California over growing housing crisis” and the text “Immediate relief from California’s affordable housing crisis may not come next year even though a series of new laws is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1,” to which the linked news story added “advocates and experts warn.”

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Which prompts me to observe that we could also do without “experts say” in news stories. Not to mention quoting “advocates” in the lead as though opinions were news. As we could do without metaphors that cannot survive the light of day, like a showdown shaping up. But I do not wish to get sidetracked into resolutions about shaping up grammatically as well as physically.

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We could also do without 'experts say' in news stories. Not to mention quoting 'advocates'

So let’s start with economically. How can adults go about believing a complex problem could vanish immediately just because the same people who got us into this mess passed another law saying they don’t want it to be?

Make no mistake, California is a mess. It’s so bad Michael Shellenberger, a lifelong progressive who has lately been hitting Old Reality pretty hard, moved on from his heretical “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” to “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.”

In a review, The New York Times excommunicated him again, saying he “does exactly what he accuses his left-wing enemies of doing: ignoring facts, best practices and complicated and heterodox approaches in favor of dogma.” But abuse is not argument. And if California is following best practices, give me dogma any day. Especially free market dogma.

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Schellenberger places much blame on the ideology of “victimology.” And fair enough, because paranoia works as badly in public as private life. Indeed, ironically, the habit of conjuring up cosmic air castles of malevolence to explain why things like homelessness and drug addiction are bad rather gets in the way of attending to facts, complexities and “heterodox approaches,” whatever those might be. It sounds like making inconsistency a virtue. But I digress.

The deeper cause of California’s woes, and ours, is actually so simple it could well be called dogmatic. It is the mindset, which Thomas Sowell calls “unconstrained” but which can fairly be described as “liberal” or “progressive,” that intentions rather than methods determine outcomes.

It sounds simplistic. The summary, I mean. But in fact it’s the ideology that, for all the sophistication, pseudo-sophistication and college degrees of its adherents, is simplistic. How else could you expect “immediate relief” from a massive housing crisis in an economy as big, wealthy and complicated as California’s because not just one new law but a series of them will be added to the massive existing pile Jan. 1?

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It’s not as though California lacks laws. I Googled, and according to the USC Gould School of Law, “There are 29 separate statutory codes in California. Each code covers one or more major subject areas (e.g., the Family Code covers family law topics, the Penal Code covers criminal law, etc.). There is no official print version of the California statutory codes. There are, however, two commercially published multi-volume sets containing the text of the codes.” Multi-volume. Yeah. I’ll bet. Not to mention the estimated 400,000 regulations.

The deeper cause of California’s woes is so simple it could be called dogmatic

Also, Wikipedia informs us, California’s Gross State Product, $3.2 trillion, is “the largest sub-national economy in the world” and if it were a country it would rank 5th. But it also has massive poverty and social dysfunction, partly because among the laws it no longer has is one making shoplifting a felony. Or defecating in public.

So who can believe that when you’re that rich and have an affordable housing crisis anyway you can make it disappear instantly by putting more good intentions on a piece of paper? And the answer is: a lot of people. Not just the NBC writer, but her editors. And readers. And voters. And professors. And anybody who says “There oughta be a law” without first asking “What incentives are at play here?”

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Neither California nor NBC are outliers here. If you look at the promises of almost any politician they consist overwhelmingly of what they want, not how they’re going to make it happen. Then news stories discuss how they might work electorally without mentioning that the person seemed to have no clue about how they might work in practice. Hence we get things like “the budget will balance itself” or ending on-reserve boil-water advisories that fail not because the methods were faulty but because there weren’t any.

So repeat after me: “In 2022 I will not mistake wishes for horses.”

National Post

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