Americans who want Socialism should move to California

DC: Trump adviser and distinguished economist Larry Kudlow wants to put socialism on trial, challenge it, debate it, rebut it — and convict it.

“I don’t want us to stand idly by,” Kudlow said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “I don’t want to let this stuff fester.”

It was an inspiring performance and the proper response to the madness fanatically endorsed by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kudlow’s speech was needed in today’s uninformed political environment. But it was just a speech. Meanwhile, a real trial is in session in California, which is steadily moving toward the outer reaches of the fringe on the political left.

To be fair, California does not have a socialist government. It’s not Cuba, North Korea, or even Venezuela, though it’s not hard to find some who will point out this state has some of the same political defects that exhausted and impoverished the latter.

California, which passed 1,016 news laws in 2018, is more of a welfare state. High taxes fund services and redistribute the wealth, and government intrusion into private affairs, from crackdowns on raw milk sales and soda, to banning Happy Meals with toys, and outlawing cars that run on gasoline, has become commonplace. These are done to benefit “the people,” but are pretenses for increasing government muscle. It’s the Blue State model, in which political society, ruled over by policymakers and bureaucrats, chases out civil society, an arrangement marked by openness, freedom, independence, and voluntary interdependence.

Much of the rest of the country might think Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, enthusiastically supported by California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris and more than two dozen of California’s Democratic representatives in the House, is a radical departure. But California has already gone there. From cutting cattle flatulence emissions to curbing commercial air travel to Stockton’s universal basic income program in which some residents receive $500 a month in pre-loaded debit cards, this state has yoked residents into its own raw deal. read more