… a new column posted at Human Events offers the cautionary tale of California’s economic woes. Author Roger Hedgecock reminds us of the incredible negative impact of uncompetitive tax rates, burdensome regulations, and a government with a very low bang for the buck.?
Businesses have been leaving California for some years now, driven to greener pastures by a growing anti-business atmosphere that has fostered a toxic mix of high (and complicated) taxes, labyrinthine regulations, and crazy jury verdicts.
For a long time after World War II, California’s opportunity attracted the best and brightest to a great climate. Government investment in freeways, a statewide water system, good schools, and great universities provided a framework for an explosion of private investment that built on the wartime spending to make California an industrial giant and the most valuable agricultural state in the U.S.
By 2000, dozens of aerospace firms such as General Dynamics, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas were practically gone, along with vehicle manufacturing companies including Chrysler, Ford, GM, and Toyota, which are now closed. All the tool and die makers, sheet metal stampers, tire makers, and workers in a myriad of other supply and industrial support businesses have evaporated along with the companies.
Tech and biotech businesses have sprouted in their place: Google, eBay, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, PayPal, Genentech, Apple. Yet even these giants that grew from modest beginnings have stopped growing in California, sprouting new plants and thousands of new jobs in other states and other countries around the world.
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While international economics pulls these companies to expand outside of California, the state’s culture of punishing success is increasingly pushing them out.
Many smaller companies, with little fanfare or notice, have joined the exodus.
