The Rawls Report
California: The Silly State of Insanity
by Alec Rawls
Opinions Staff

The backstory to California's upcoming recall election is the destruction of the state's economy by the liberty-hating Democrat legislature. They hate gun rights, they hate school choice, but the liberty they hate the most is economic liberty. Governor Davis gets to be the poster boy for this anti-capitalist leftism because he single-handedly struck the biggest blow when he refused to let the state-regulated consumer price of electricity rise during the electricity crisis.

Now Democrat replacement candidate Cruz Bustamante wants to do the same thing with gasoline, proposing a state constitutional amendment that would allow the state to dictate gasoline prices. The only difference is that Bustamante is also a racist who refuses to renounce his ties to the Nazi-like Chicano organization MEChA.

MEChA's founding slogan is: "For the race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing." MEChA is also a leftist anti-capitalist organization, proclaiming in its founding document that: "Our cultural values of life, family, and home will serve as a powerful weapon to defeat the gringo dollar value system and encourage the process of love and brotherhood."

Leftists are real good at love and brotherhood. 100 million murdered in the twentieth century in the name of love and brotherhood. But let's start with more mundane matters, like the fitness of someone who rejects the "gringo dollar value system" to be governor. Since Bustamante seeks to repeat Davis's electricity crisis mistake, it is important to understand what an astounding mistake it was.

Electricity

Price elasticity estimates indicated that, when California's electricity crisis started to hit in 2000, the consumer price of electricity would only have had to about double to bring demand into line with supply, and only for the year it would take for new supply to come online. When instead Davis refused to let the regulated consumer price rise, low consumer prices caused demand to remain unmoderated, which caused wholesale prices to spike by factors of 50 to 100, with the difference between the wholesale and the consumer price covered by state borrowing.

More than half of California's 38 billion dollar budget deficit can be attributed to this entirely unnecessary expenditure. An equally large long term expense is the contracts for electricity that Davis signed at the height of the crisis. Generators offered lower prices in 2001 in exchange for doubling long term prices, and Davis signed many years worth of such contracts.

Saddled with these gigantic burdens, California simply can't compete. The proprietor of a local quickie-mart showed me his electricity bill: $2500/month, or about the same as rent. Most companies, even if they just have a building full of computer users, are electricity intensive. Add in the high taxes, and they want to be anywhere but here.

Davis turned a modest short term problem into a huge long term problem. Out of pure old-fashioned capitalism-hating leftism, he sent a torpedo square amid-ships into the state's economy. Davis has truly earned his way out of office. Bustamante, in wanting to make the identical mistake with gasoline, has earned his way out of office before the election.

But the Democrat-leftist hatred of economic liberty goes far beyond Soviet style rejection of freedom of contract in the setting of prices. They hate freedom of contract and freedom of association generally. Like Davis, Bustamante will sign every liberty-hating bill the Democrat legislature sends down, and they are sending plenty.

Freedom of contract and association

One new law allows men who want to dress as women to sue for employment discrimination. What? You didn't promote that 250 pound bald man wearing a dress and a push-up bra? See you in court. And what sane jury would ever believe that this person's grotesque behavior is NOT an impairment to advancement? You're screwed.

This follows California's expansion of anti-discrimination law three years ago to cover sexual-orientation. Companies in California now have to worry about getting sued for everything under the sun. They have to watch everybody's race, everybody's sex, everybody's sexual orientation, everybody's religion, everybody's dress, everybody's age, everybody's disability and try to make sure that no-one has any way to claim discrimination or harassment. That's an impossible order, when everyone has million-dollar incentive to interpret every slight or setback as discrimination or harassment, in a state where politically correct jurors strive to honor every victim claim.

Only liberty can judge merit. Companies have full incentive to hire and promote the best employees. Turning the job of judging merit over to dizzy jurors on the he-said she-said merry-go-round of tort law strips liberty of jurisdiction and replaces it with Russian roulette. Do business in California, shoot yourself in the head.

Of course California Democrats are not content just with government oversight of merit either. They also want government to trump merit, as with the use of affirmative action. Another example is the crazy bill that just breezed through the state's lower house, holding companies liable for damages whenever any employee promotes another employee he has a romantic relationship with, regardless of the merits of the promotion.

Any company doing business in San Francisco will simply have to leave. Imagine being liable for which homosexual employee is promoting which homosexual love object when half of your employees are promiscuously sleeping with each other? "Merit not mating" is the bill's catchphrase, but that is a misnomer. The bill has nothing to do with merit. It is only anti-mating. But how can anyone think that it is the government's job to be anti-mating?

Holding both houses of the legislature and the governor's rubber stamp, the Democrats are laying into the state's economy like the iceberg that sank the Titanic. The only immediate hope for California is veto power. Mr. Schwarzenegger may be a pretty weak veto, being a leftist himself on half the issues, but at least he would throw some sand into the Democrats' now unchecked drive to self-destruction.

Racism

MEChA defenders, like Los Angeles Times editor Frank del Olmo, have tried to deny the racist nature of the organization by saying it has outgrown its 60's ideology, but MEChA's new constitution, adopted in 1995, reasserts that its primary objective is "liberating Aztlan." "Philosophy Papers" and "Goals and Objectives" amended as late as 1999 also continue to affirm MEChA's founding document, El Plan de Aztlan, as the group's guiding vision.

Aztlan is a mythical Aztec homeland that includes the entire southwestern United States, from Texas to Oregon. According to El Plan, "Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans." This is an anti-American organization that rejects the principles of individual liberty in favor of group rights. Their version of democracy is representation of groups by quota, with "equal representation of Chicanas and Chicanos." As with their envisioned future state, everyone else's quota is zero. "For those outside the race, nothing."

Their radical-leftist anti-capitalism is also current ideology. At MEChA's annual conference in 2000, the keynote speaker opined that: "Capitalism is the root of domination. Racism and sexism exist because capitalism requires it." Yup, it's hard to think of anything so oppressive as freedom. Bustamante demonstrates this ideology with his championship of every Democrat attack on economic liberty. Prices are to be set by the state, not by individual agreement. Merit is to be judged by the state, not by individuals, and is to be trumped by the state to implement racial preferences.

Bustamante is Mechista to his core. He is a racist national socialist. His organization, MEChA, is a cadre of radical leftists who espouse the most explicit racism while proclaiming that the real racist force, the great enemy to be destroyed, is American liberty. Stanford students who are thinking of joining this group be warned: you will be marked for life. This country will not long tolerate your Nazi party. If Bustamante wins, the inevitable demise of California will take his leftist-racist cause down with it.

Alec Rawls is a Contributing Editor of The Stanford Review. He is currently writing a book on republicanism. Contact alec@rawls.org or visit www.rawls.org.