On my daily trek taking my son to school this morning, I heard Arthur Laffer interviewed about his new book (co-authored with several others) on WLS radio. The title of the book should ring a bell to anyone with a modicum of education: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of States: How Taxes, Energy, and Worker Freedom will Change the Balance of Power Among States. Adam Smith as you may remember wrote a little tome back in 1776 that many consider the beginning of modern economics. Often titled and referred to as The Wealth of Nations, its actual title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Writing a book at this time in American history about states and wealth creation, or not, is genius.
In the interview he asserts what conservatives/libertarians already knew, that states that have adopted the income tax, every single one of them has declined as a share of the US in terms of population, employment and output, and tax revenue! (You can hear the interview here.) And there are other implications that won’t surprise us at all.
Then I came across an article today from the Orange County Register, “Taking a back seat to Texas: Toyota’s plans to shift its U.S. headquarters from L.A. County to the Dallas area should alarm California’s political leadership.” It won’t. After I read that and thinking about the interview with Laffer I wondered to myself, are progressives/liberals just stupid or so blinded by their ideology that facts and results and data just don’t matter to them. I suspect it is the latter.
The Register piece should be devastating to the political leadership of California, but blind is blind. The liberals at the LA Times and California Democrats have tried to explain away Toyota’s move as just a corporate decision to consolidate their operations closer to their manufacturing hubs in the South, but one move does not a trend make. A bunch of companies have left California in recent years, most because of the horrible business climate overseen by left-wing Democrat politicians. And as the article points out, the state’s supposed commitment to “green” energy couldn’t even convince electric car maker Tesla to build a manufacturing plant in the state. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
After 30 plus years of political and cultural engagement, I am more convinced than ever that the Soviet Union analogy applies to 21st Century progressive/liberal politics and culture in America. A few conservatives in the 70s and 80s knew the USSR was a hollow shell, a virtual Potemkin village built by deluded dreamers who thought they could plan a society better than real people could actually live it. It appeared to most of us that the Soviet Union and its empire were practically eternal; until 1989 we could not conceive of a world without the USSR. When the Berlin Wall fell, the truth and reality revealed the lie for what it was. Modern progressive/liberalism rests on no less a false foundation, and one day the wall we perceive today as impenetrable will also crumble; truth and reality cannot be forever mocked.