Grandiosity comes standard when you’re a third-generation 1%er like venture capitalist Tim Draper. Among other things, the dorky 55-year-old claims to have invented viral marketing. (Whatever.) He founded a non-accredited “Draper University of Heroes” for aspiring entrepreneurs, based in part on Hogwarts. He’s a right-wing Republican who voted for Obama.
Draper’s latest foray into the political arena is a ballot initiative that, if he garners the required 807,000 signatures, will ask voters this November to do for the Golden State what the 1990s did to Yugoslavia — split California into six states. (This is his second dance. Voters rejected his mandatory school vouchers proposition in 2000. )
“California as it is is ungovernable,” Draper says. “It is more and more difficult for Sacramento to keep up with the social issues from the various regions of California. With six Californias, people will be closer to their state governments, and states can get a refresh.”
Actually, the result wouldn’t be six Californias. It would be six pieces of what used to be California:
San Diego + Orange County = “South California”
L.A. + Santa Barbara = “West California”
Bakersfield + Fresno + Stockton = “Central California”
San Francisco + San Jose = “Silicon Valley”
Sacramento = “North California”
Eureka + Redding metro = the awesome, totally not broke, new state of “Jefferson”
Is Draper’s measure a good idea? I don’t know. What I do know is that the arguments Draper makes in favor of balkanization make zero sense. Whatever the merits of his splitsville scheme, it’s scary to endorse anything ginned up by such a messy mind.
Consider these excerpts from Draper’s recent interview with Time. They make fellow right-wing multimillionaire Donald Trump look levelheaded in comparison:
We now spend the most and get the least. We spend among the most for education and we’re 46th in education. We spend among the most for prisons, and we are among the highest recidivism rates … So the status quo is failing. And there have been some very good people running California, governing California. So it must be systemic. At best, the system seems to be on a spiral down. At worst it’s a monopoly, and in a monopoly, they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want. In a competitive environment, people get good service and they pay fair prices.
If California’s current woes are “systemic” — i.e., the result of California’s current size — why didn’t the same system “spiral down” during the state’s postwar boom years?
Draper says the state is a “monopoly” that “can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service they want.” To the extent that that’s true — just like businesses, governments are subject to constituent/customer pressure — it’s true of all governments. It’s not like drivers in West California will pay lower fees for their drivers licenses by picking them up in South California — or that South California would have any incentive to offer lower fees, i.e., compete.
You know how everything looks like a nail when you’re a hammer? When you’re a VC, everything looks like a business. But states aren’t businesses and people aren’t just consumers.
We don’t have to look far for examples of states whose capitals are closer to their citizen. New England is already divvied up into tiny states. “Our government will be more in touch with our individual constituents” if California breaks into smaller parts, says Draper. If he’s right, the New England states should be a shining beacon of governance. But they’re not. They’re just average.
There’s just no evidence that efficient or responsive service is related to a state’s size. History, resources and luck are the real determinants.
By most standards, Vermont and Massachusetts offer better services to their citizens than Maine or New Hampshire (not to mention livelier job markets). But they’re not “competing” against each other. Why don’t we see an exodus of former Mainers to Vermont? People who stay in Maine stay there because they like it. They grew up there. Their families are there. They dig the lobster rolls. Whatever. They’re not going to move to Massachusetts just to get Romneycare.
The strongest argument for Six Californias is that we are not well-represented. The people down south are very concerned with things like immigration law and the people way up north are frustrated by taxation without representation. And the people in coastal California are frustrated because of water rights. And the people in Silicon Valley are frustrated because the government doesn’t keep up with technology. And in Los Angeles, their issues revolve around copyright law.
Copyright law. Yep, that’s what all Angelenos care about. Who could ever forget the Intellectual Property Riots of 1992? Brother against brother, PC vs. Mac, VHS vs. Beta. Brrrrr.
Seriously, though, doesn’t Draper know that the federal government, not the state, has jurisdiction over border control? Tech regulations, the Internet — that’s the feds too. And copyright.
If the “strongest argument” in favor of breaking up California is to address issues that states don’t control…well, don’t make me say it.
Draper adds: “I’ve noticed that the people most adamant about creating their own state or being a part of their own state are the poorest regions, and in the current system, they are not happy, because it is not working for them. So if they had their own state, I believe all of those states would become wealthier.”
By Draper’s reasoning, Mississippi and Alabama — the nation’s poorest states — should split apart too. They’d all become wealthier, right?
As long as logicians like Tim Draper walk the earth, political cartoonists will never be out of work.
3 Comments.
Ya know Ted, I really don’t care how much money these delta bravos have, it doesn’t mean they’re smart outside of figuring out how to game a particular financial structure to make themselves rich. They’re all morons outside of that. Our society just assumes that if someone is a billionaire or has a lot of money, it’s because they must be really smart or something. Tom Perkins is another idiot that just needs to shut up, and people need to stop paying attention to them.
My take on this is that it is part of what Noam Chomsky talks about in terms of right wing states rights issues. Namely superficially this looks like a good thing, you are making the government more accountable to its people by making it more local. Indeed that is basically what he says as quoted above: “It is more and more difficult for Sacramento to keep up with the social issues from the various regions of California. With six Californias, people will be closer to their state governments, and states can get a refresh”. Such thoughts makes it easy for the powerful 0.1% to sell these sort of states-rights and more local governments to the larger more libertarian styled republican base.
Now admittedly there are some good ideas to just that, which is why such arguments sell, there is a non-trivial element of truth and logic to them making them easy to swallow. But that isn’t why the 0.1%er favor them. 0.1%er favor smaller more local governments because they are easier to bully. One has to be a very wealthy and powerful trans-national corporation to bully, and fully corrupt the US national government to their liking. But even medium sized corporations that are non-transnation have no problem bullying states.
This is why companies like Raytheon and Fidelity bully MA but not the US national government all the time for more subsidies, tax cuts, and other benefits. They have the power to bully MA into doing these things but not the federal government. They can threaten to leave MA to GA or something if their demands aren’t met and throw that many workers out of work in MA, but they lack the power to threaten to leave the US and do the same.
Also that is just the bullying aspect of it. There are other aspects like the corruption aspect of it. The smaller and more local a government is, the cheaper it is to buy it out. Estimates for buying the national congress out every year place the cost around $2 billion. I don’t know what it costs to buy out the California congress every year, but I bet it is at least an order of magnitude less then $2 billion, and it will be many times less if split six ways (not six times less there are non-linear effects to these things, the whole is greater then the sum of its parts)
As such when I look at Tim Draper’s words above the only thing I am seeing him say is “yah California is a little to big and powerful for me to bully and corrupt to my liking. Can we like break up into more manageable chunks so I can really get my game on?”
Also there is a totally different sinister aspect of it not covered in my previous post that is unique to California.
Namely, California is a net liberal state, mostly due to a few major costal cities. The rest is actually pretty heavily conservative. But depending on how you Gerrymander its six way split up, one could easily turn it into one liberal state and five new conservative ones. That would basically add 10 new conservative senators to the US senate. A pretty ingenious nefarious plan really.