A friend just brought National Affairs magazine to my attention, with the guileless query, “…let me know what you think.”  What I think, sadly, is that there are a whole lot of educated people in this country who need to tune up their crap detectors.

Looking at the About page of the new magazine, I recognized some of the names, particularly that of Bill Kristol, a well-known promoter of conservative philosophy via The Weekly Standard and FOX News.  Look up the bios of the editors, authors and publication committee, and you’ll find connections to National Review, Hudson Institute, Manhattan Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Project for the New American Century, Pepperdine University, and other hotbeds of conservativism.

Turning to the article that had particularly caught my friend’s eye, Troy Senik’s “Who Killed California?” what was particularly notable was the author’s selective attention.  At a macro level, much of the itemization of California’s sad circumstances is true (or reasonably true) and fact-based—budgetary crisis, legislative gridlock, outmigration of residents. However, when it comes to explanations, the author is highly selective about the information presented. 
 
As just one example, in the section about how broken the initiative process is, there is a paragraph with examples of wealthy people who have backed ballot initiatives.  All of those individuals are lefties, and their issues were politically consonant with that.  However, he did not mention any of the conservative ballot measures, such as the one to block the power of local governments to use eminent domain in ways that are beneficial to communities, which was backed by a rich real estate developer from the East Coast, who also backed similar measures in at least a half-dozen states. 
 
Also notice how, in Senik’s brief Prop 13 discussion, there is no mention of the differential effect of how treating commercial and residential businesses alike has seriously altered the revenue stream to increase the proportion of state taxes paid by California homeowners, while decreasing the proportion paid by businesses and industry.  Selective presentation of information should alert the reader to possible ideological bias.

When we reach the final section of Senik’s article, we get to the ultimate point:

What is increasingly clear, however, is that the Golden State's troubles offer a warning to the rest of the country. If America continues its long tradition of following trends begun in California, it will be brought to grief. And the state's recent history bears directly on some ongoing national political debates.

There is little in President Obama's legislative agenda that hasn't already been tried in California. Need a model of runaway spending with no regard for growing debt? Look to California, whose bonds currently hover just above junk status. Want to insist on restrictive carbon-emission controls? Note the example of California's 2006 greenhouse-gas law, which is expected to reduce the state's economic output by 10% and destroy 1.1 million jobs. Want to put the government in charge of health care? Look at California's repeated legislative pushes for a single-payer system of health-insurance coverage, each of which ended in failure.

California’s problems extrapolated to Obama’s agenda?  That’s some stretch.  Look at all the states across the country that are in financial crisis, due to decreased revenues during an economic downturn precipitated by the irresponsible financial sector. Predictions about the effect of California’s greenhouse-gas law?  Imagine what the impacts of coastal flooding, widespread drought, and international migration crises due to global warming will be on the country’s economic output and job count; the short-turn impact of controlling greenhouse gases on California’s economy is nothing by comparison.  And a single-payer health care system?  We haven’t seen this one enacted yet in California, so how could this model have ended in failure?  There is no basis for comparison.

We will learn over the next decade whether California can manage to avoid disaster one more time. But even if the state's years of living large finally catch up with it, there is still an escape hatch: Sensible Californians can continue to flee to places like Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, and Texas, where the respite from hostile government more than compensates for the social opprobrium that tends to meet California expatriates. But if the nation as a whole repeats California's mistakes, the consequences will be much more severe; an America beset by rigid bureaucracies, economic decline, and enervated spirit will not be able to preserve liberty at home or protect it abroad. Before we head down that path, we should look west to see how these ideas have fared — and absorb the lessons of how the Golden State lost its luster.

I wouldn’t argue that “rigid bureaucracies, economic decline, and enervated spirit” would lead to a pleasant place to live.  Indeed, the totalitarian Soviet Union, which experienced all of those things, was NOT a viable model.  But neither, it appears, was leadership incompetence, failure to regulate corporate activities, widespread corruption, military adventurism, and ideological denial of scientific realities, as seen during the Bush-Cheney regime, an attractive alternative for the American public.

Note that Senik served in the White House as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and previously wrote for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Republican Representative Newt Gingrich.

So I advised my friend to read National Affairs with a skeptical eye, if at all. The tone of some of the articles sounds reasonable and fact-based, but there is the usual underlying selective presentation and interpretation of information, and an intention to move the reader's opinion in the conservative direction. Having a new publication churning out the same old stuff under a different banner is not an admirable  innovation. 

I do wish more people would recognize that, with a little bit of online checking, it is pretty easy to determine whether a source is worthy of attention.  In other words, one should use one’s crap detector—there’s a lot of bovine excretory material out there.
 
As for moving out of California, that might be a rational decision for anyone, regardless of where one is on the political spectrum. The state IS in terrible shape on multiple counts.  Its financing system (prominently featuring Prop 13) is seriously deficient, infrastructure is crumbling, the initiative process is broken, population growth continues apace, and climate change and the resulting environmental deterioration will undermine the state’s most notable asset, nice weather.

Senik, by the way, lives in California.  As do I.