Over three decades ago, the enlightened, thoughtful, and selfless masses who comprised the California electorate, etched in constitutional stone a requirement that there could be no future tax increases in the state without the approval of two-thirds of the California legislature. Rightfully enraged about legislative inertia in the face of escalating property taxes, the people of the Golden State rose up to pass Proposition 13 with 67% of the vote. Thus, a paroxysm of voter wrath was the mother of profound political and historical irony; a super-majority of Californians transferred the ultimate veto power to a minority, utilizing the uber-democratic mechanism of the ballot initiative to render California politics intrinsically undemocratic for all eternity. When it comes to the all-important question of financing California state government, the minority rules.
Which would be fine by me, or at least, operationally and philosophically consistent, had the California electorate also amputated their appetites for great heaping platters of government services along with the means to pay for them. However, preferring to subscribe to Emerson's nonsensical contention that "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," the voters of California have spent the last thirty years demonstrated their powers of disavowal and cognitive dissonance, noisily demanding low-to-no taxes and social services on par with Scandinavia. Approximately every six months we descend into the trenches of budget battle with Democrats flatly rejecting anything resembling a cut in government programs, and Republicans just as intently eschewing anything resembling a tax increase. Having achieved impasse, the two parties then join hands to engage in accounting mythology and call it a budget, perpetuating $15 billion dollar structural deficits and the state's abysmal credit rating on into the future.
What is striking is how content Californians are with this utterly dysfunctional arrangement. Voters largely tune out from budget dramas in Sacramento, and why shouldn't they? From a practical point of view, their day-to-day lives are largely unscathed by any tangible consequences of their credit-card conservatism and low-tax liberal largesse. Infantilism has been the dominant ideology of Californians since the late 70s, which distilled to its essence, is as intellectually reflective and morally conscious as a teenager set loose in a shopping mall with the parental Visa.
Thus, there is a properly conservative argument to be made for eliminating the No Taxation Without Two-Thirds Approval feature from the state constitution. It is this; California voters need to truly SEE AND FEEL the cost of state government. A gleeful Democratic majority in the Legislature, having slipped the surly bonds of Proposition 13, would undoubtedly enact the level of taxation appropriate for financing their elephantine welfare state, at which point the consequences and costs of the welfare state would become starkly clear to California voters. The practical pain of such intellectual honesty would be too much for California voters to bear. The Republicans would subsequently control the Legislature for at least a generation.
Proposition 13 insulated the great inchoate mass of Californians from having to pay forall the government that they wanted...and they want A LOT. That condition is as immoral as it is unsustainable. JFK said that to govern is to choose, and Californians need to pay for their choices. Conservatives should support such a day of reckoning. Nothing would do more to endorse the cause of limited government as the voters being made intimately aware of the costs of big government.
