The states are responsible for themselves, and Californians and New Yorkers can and should be expected to pay the full cost of the governments they elect and the policies they support. The states remain, after all, sovereign, the dual sovereignty of the states and the federal government being one of the unique features of American government. That dual sovereignty has been eroded in past decades, and not only by the nationalizing passion of the progressives. In the midst of all this ghastly new talk of “nationalism” on the right, you can barely hear voices issuing forth from the graves of Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, saying: “No, thanks!” But we have not gone so far down that road that the states have been reduced to mere administrative subdivisions of the federal government — even if they’ll ask to be treated as federal dependents when their unpayable pension bills come due.

California is very expensive by American standards and a bargain by world standards. As it turns out, people are pretty good at figuring that out: California has for some years been losing its native-born population to the other 49 states, but those emigrants are more than replaced by immigrants from around the world, many of them from places that make California look lightly taxed and well governed. (Which it is, by comparison with India or Venezuela.) That isn’t how I’d do things if I were the Emperor of Malibu, but Californians, so far, seem to be content with their own way of doing things. Let California be California.