Highway Robbery: Why Californians Shouldn’t Trust the Federal Gas Tax

Today, California voters will have a chance to weigh in on Prop 6, which would repeal a 12 cent/gallon increase in the state gas tax which came into effect last November (as well as cutting associated spending on roads and other transportation infrastructure in California). Nearly absent from the Prop 6 debate has been any […]

The Strange Power of ‘Ecotopia’

In “Could the ‘Ecotopia’ fantasy actually become reality?” columnist Dan Walters recently speculated that California, Washington, and Oregon are collectively implementing the tenets of Ecotopia, the secessionist eco-state depicted in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel of the same name. I get the sense that Dan Walters has not read the book recently. Partly, because to summarize […]

Why We Shouldn’t Wait on Washington for Better Health Care

Let’s face it, health care in California is a mess. For the average person, buying insurance and accessing care is expensive and confusing. Small business owners must choose between paying enormous amounts of money to insure their employees, or hiring from the much smaller pool of people who have some other way of accessing care. […]

The Great Migration Myth

Tell me if you’ve heard this story before: thanks to sky-high housing costs, over-taxation, and/or failed liberal policies, Californians, especially the middle class, are fleeing the state. There’s one huge flaw: Californians aren’t actually leaving the state at anything like a significant rate. According the U.S. Census, between 2014 and 2015, California had thesecond lowest out-migration rate after […]

The California taxpayer’s case for independence

On Tuesday afternoon, Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office cleared the California Freedom Coalition’s initiative, “California Autonomy from Federal Government,” for circulation. If passed, it would direct the Governor, in coordination with our congressional delegation, to negotiate more autonomy for California, possibly up to the point of California becoming an independent country. Why should California want […]