California should be heaven on earth, but is en route to becoming the proverbial hell on a road paved with good intentions.
The latest example is the state’s insurance debacle. State Farm, the largest insurer in California, said this week that it will stop issuing new home and business policies, partly due to the risk of wildfires and the cost of construction. (Allstate quietly followed soon after.)
While the left might blame climate change, the real reason is state policy.
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara — who authored the state’s own “Medicare for All” proposal — won’t let insurance companies charge higher premiums for the growing risks that climate change activists say are on the way (and that skeptics blame on poor forestry).
The Wall Street Journal notes that California is the only state that requires insurance companies to set premium prices based on past risks, not on future ones.
The intention — to give Lara the benefit of the doubt — is a noble one. Homes are already absurdly expensive in California, as is the cost of doing business. Keeping insurance premiums down is a nice idea.
But when prices are so low that they make insurance unprofitable, companies leave or collapse. That means Californians may struggle to find insurance — and, ironically, may be forced to pay more for it, as the supply of policies shrinks.
That is basically how California functions: our government creates laws and regulations that theoretically aim at some inspiring social goal, but which, in practice, make that goal impossible to achieve.
Take the state’s goal of achieving 100% renewable energy by 2045.
By closing its fossil fuel plants, California has created artificial power shortages in peak demand, when electric cars can’t be charged, and the state must burn diesel to survive.
Or another example: the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles are filled with homeless people, and retail districts are plagued by theft. There are many reasons for this malaise, but a big one is that California has decided over the years to keep mentally ill people out of institutions, to decriminalize drug use, and to stop prosecuting minor offenses.
By protecting the autonomy of some, California has deprived others — the majority — of our liberty.
Gavin Newsom, our governor, clearly has national political ambitions. He spends little time dealing with our own problems, and devotes much of his attention to criticizing social policies in Republican-run states. He lacks both the interest and skill to manage everyday practical problems.
He likes to troll Florida, which became the model for successful conservative governance under Ron DeSantis (no matter what you think of his presidential campaign).
But California’s unemployment rate has begun to rise again in the post-pandemic economy, while Florida’s has continued to fall. California has a disproportionate share of the nation’s poor and homeless. And without the recent rainy winter, it would also be out of water.
Newsom kept California closed during the pandemic for more than a year, and banned communal religious worship — a policy that was struck down by the Supreme Court. For all that, California did not do better than Florida in protecting public health.
Even when Newsom gets something right, like canceling the absurd high-speed rail project, he gets it wrong: he is still wasting money on the remote, rural portion of the bullet train.
Newsom’s sole achievement in public office has been, as San Francisco mayor, to launch the nationwide effort to legalize same-sex marriage.
But on that issue, too, good intentions have been overtaken by unintended consequences.
If freedom to love was the original goal, now the focus of state law seems to be to suppress objections to children being urged to accept life-altering surgery or drugs to “affirm” their chosen gender identity. As Pride month begins, it seems that the LGBTQ+ movement, whose rainbow flag stood for tolerance, has become viciously hostile to dissent.
The basic problem is that California, once a beacon of freedom, became so successful that we imagined utopia might be within reach. Our magical studios in Hollywood helped us imagine it; our tech innovations in Silicon Valley gave us the wealth to pursue it.
But it turns out to be easier to disrupt traditional norms and industries than to create new ones. Like every other civilization that has tried to perfect human beings, we have failed.
The Jewish Sages of the Talmud knew the limits of good intentions.
The Biblical law to cancel debts every seven years sounds nice, but in practice it meant the poor could never obtain credit. So Hillel the Elder introduced the idea that loans could be transferred to the courts. That way creditors could be paid legally — and the poor could borrow. That is the source of the phrase “tikkun olam” — which the Jewish left misinterprets in socialist terms.
The world is not perfectible, and neither are we. A better world is possible, but it requires that we accept certain limits and boundaries.
Loans must be collected; crime must be punished; children must be shielded from adult sexuality; citizens and legal immigrants must have privileges illegal migrants do not.
The moral duty to care for the poor falls on us as individuals, and communities. But the more the state does, the less it achieves. And Newsom, least of all.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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