A Fresh Chance for California

By James Wilson July 31, 2018 at 4:39pm

The winners of California’s primary election for governor are Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox. The state has voted overwhelmingly Democratic for decades, with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger creating a lone dimple from 2003 to 2011; the legislature and other statewide offices remained in Democrat hands.

People are leaving and wanting to leave the bastion of political correctness where raising a family becomes tougher and tougher under the nation’s highest income tax rates and the highest poverty rates combined with desperately failing schools and roads. Crime is off the charts, much of it attributed to California’s status as a sanctuary state in which a small percentage of illegal immigrants commit a high percentage of violent crimes.

Is it fair to ask if California has a fresh chance for a new season?

One can always ask.

The problem is the high numbers of people wanting to leave are apparently motivated solely by economic factors. The recent primary votes imply a lack of insight into the cultural and political factors behind the state’s decline.

In plain English, a relative few accept responsibility for California; they just want it better.

Newsom is proud to trumpet his role in promoting same-sex marriage and the persecution of those who disagree. He is just as proud of championing higher gas taxes and vehicle fees despite the fact that they’re not being spent on roads and mass transit remains a bottomless pit of unfinished projects like the bullet train. He would continue sanctuary state status to the death and is oblivious to the link between high homeless rates and his economic policies. He plans to end the war on drugs in favor of extended — and expensive — access to treatment that boasts a very low rate of success except when in the hands of the very churches he despises.

He plans entirely taxpayer-funded health care despite the massive failure of Obamacare in his own state. His solution to unemployment is to increase the minimum wage despite evidence high minimum wages increase unemployment. He supports the state’s assisted suicide law despite overwhelming evidence of rampant abuse in every jurisdiction operating in its shadow. He says the solution to overcrowded jails and prisons is to reduce their population — just do it — despite the rising crime rates that accompany every reduction without a workable restorative justice system in place.

He wants to force already over-regulated and -taxed small businesses to pay for family leave for all employees giving birth — it is the enforced payment that impacts — and he imagines it is government’s job to curb sugary drinks and ensure no one will be offended on the state’s campuses. He is a prime exponent of the doctrine government officials may enforce those laws with which they agree and ignore or break those with which they are not in sympathy. In other words — and he proved this over marriage laws as mayor of San Francisco — might makes right.

Personally, I believe a state’s values determine the health of its economy, but by any measure Newsom’s values define California’s economy and the current state of her culture. A vote for Newsom is a vote for business as it has been in California.

Any who disagree — as in the case of Chick-fil-A, Tastries Bakery or even Care Net pregnancy centers — can be run out of business or crippled in place.

The question is, do enough California voters get it that when one is persecuted, all are at serious risk?

The Republican alternative is John Cox. He is known in the state as a maverick transplant from Illinois, like Ronald Reagan. His rep is of a successful entrepreneur and quixotic political hopeful who has never won office but has sponsored a failed initiative to create so-called neighborhood legislatures.

Yet his program is nothing if not simple. He is emphatically pro-life at every level of life. This worldview informs everything he would do as governor. Worldviews are like that.

Cox would repeal the $52 billion road taxes and vehicle fees of the Jerry Brown-Newsom regime, believing jobs are created when money is released into personal hands and more jobs create more funding for government at the same time they bring prosperity. He would audit Caltrans to discover where all those billions are going. He would roll back excessive regulations and encourage small businesses that are the biggest providers of jobs. These alone would help the economy big-time.

I am pretty sure he would just do away with the multibillions of tax dollars being spent on embryonic stem cell research with never a single return in decades of spending. He would repeal sanctuary state laws and bring California back into compliance with federal law and her constitutional responsibilities. He would work off of his own successful record as one who has mobilized 20,000 volunteers to repair 1,000 homes since 1991. All of these measures reflect his commitment to a culture of life, just as Newsom’s reflect his unwitting commitment to a culture of death.

Oh well. Cox cannot win in California, and even if he did he would still have to deal with a legislature and bureaucracy overwhelming in its opposition to all for which he stands.

Yeah, and that’s what they said about Donald Trump.

California has a chance for a change. Its name is John Cox.

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