The prevalent ideology of the majority of Californians, indeed most Americans, is infantilism...One of my heroes, George F. Will, manufactured the term in a column back in the mid 1970s, and it remains the reigning political philosophy in the Land of the Brave (Consumer) and the Home of the Free (Lunch)...
Will described infantilism as the ideology of the six year old, willing expensive ends while simultaneously rejecting the means to pay for those ends...Infantilists are found in both parties, and call themselves "conservatives" and "progressives" with a straight face. They are equally allergic to common sense, and like a child, become downright Vesuvian when confronted with any sort of limits.
Specifically, infantilism demands a society where a large and energetic government provides LOTS of services AND tax rates approaching zero. The G.O.P. rarely likes to admit what they know is true: most voters and a majority of Republicans, LOVE big government and the services that it provides. However, those same voters don't want to pay for those services. They just don't.
Government is extremely expensive, often rightly so. What politicians have been doing since the late 70s is accomodating the public's infantilism by keeping government programs and services in place and keeping taxes absurdly low. Reagan was especially gifted at this sort of dreamy fiscal irresponsibility...Reagan NEVER sent Congress a budget proposal that was remotely balanced...He offered up tax cuts, increased military spending, and social spending that was largely unscathed...As a president Reagan could get away with enabling infantilism because he ran a federal government that could print money...Interestingly enough, when Reagan was governor of California, he was far more realistic, raising EVERY conceivable tax to cover the Golden State's budget shortfall in 1967...perhaps that was because as a state, California HAS to balance its budget, lacking the feds' magic printing presses for manufacturing currency and debt...He also didn't have to contend with Proposition 13's absurd legislative supermajority requirement for tax increases
But I digress...Californians are currently confronted with the consequences of their infantilism, and much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments has ensued...A forty-two billion dollar budget deficit requires gigantic cuts in spending, and equally gigantic tax increases...
For too long, we as a state and as a country, have been allowed to believe that we can have massive government largesse and not pay for it, that, as Victor Davis Hanson said, we of the broad middle class can live like eighteenth century French aristocrats and never face any manner of reckoning...
Infantilism is about to get run over by the Humvee of hard facts...there will be less government, and it will be more expensive...It is the long overdue dawning of sense, and the return of reality...
