How liberalism destroyed California

It took years for liberalism’s mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations to make California’s once-creative economy resemble Gulliver immobilized by the Lilliputians’ many threads. The state, which between 1990 and 2007 lost 26 percent of its factory jobs and 35 percent of its high-tech manufacturing jobs, ranks behind only New York, another of liberalism’s laboratories, in the number of outward-bound moving vans.

It took years for compassionate liberalism to make California’s welfare menu contribute to the state becoming an importer of Mexico’s poverty. It took years for servile liberalism to turn the state into what Voegeli calls a “unionocracy,” run by and for unionized public employees, such as public safety employees who can retire at 50 and receive 90 percent of the final year’s pay for life.

Friend reports that when the seven-hour meeting ended, the protest moved to the UC president’s house. Two buses carried “some hundred Berkeley students and members of AFSCME.” Perfect.