Join me in welcoming @GadSaad to @cwclub in SF in exactly two weeks, on Wed June 10th at 5:30 PDT! Gad is an evolutionary behavioral scientist and offers a unique perspective on societal ills stemming from inherited traits that have proven maladaptive in modern society. His new @HarperCollins book is “Suicidal Empathy - Dying to Be Kind,” which is a much-anticipated follow-up to 2021’s “The Parasitic Mind - How Infectuous Ideas are Killing Common Sense.” Gad will be in conversation with fellow honey badger, investigative journalist and author Michael @shellenberger More details and registration links, both in-person and remote, via link below 👇 commonwealthclub.org/events/…

California will be bankrupt by 2030. If you’re expecting a state pension, it is at risk. If you don’t believe it, check Grok or Gemini and explore how California politicians changed the reporting rules on your pension so they could hide how underwater it is. The middle class citizens of California will soon be asked to pay a huge price to bail out the state. Why them? Because that is where most of the wealth of California resides. It’s easy to single out “billionaires” but there aren’t many of them and they can and will all leave before the bottom falls out. They are leaving in droves already. The mismanagement in California is biblical - and the scale is huge because it’s the world’s 4th largest economy. California politicians and their henchmen are now entering the coverup phase where they can no longer hide their financial incompetence so they are taking from average California residents to try and hide what they’ve done: You will soon see ballot initiatives with fancy tiles like “billionaire tax”. But those are lies. They are mechanisms to tax everything, every way: Excise taxes Wealth taxes Private property confiscation It’s all happening now. If you want to preserve California, you will need to stand up because California has become a kleptocracy.

The wealth tax meant Silicon Valley lost Larry and Sergey. Good, I say. Governments should fear losing their citizens the way businesses fear losing their customers. They should compete for them. The Founders thought so. Madison's "compound republic" was an architecture of rivalry. Are you an entrepreneur? go to Franklin's Pennsylvania, get low taxes, liberal land policy, a broad franchise. Drawn to Puritan moral codes and town meeting governance, and don't mind social conformity? Can't beat Massachusetts. Are you a wannabe aristocrat? Virginia's landholding system is for you. States offered different constitutions, property laws, tax structures, visions of the good life. Citizens could migrate toward the jurisdictions that served their interests and convictions. Jefferson's westward expansion intensified the pressure. Each new state was conceived as a model of freedom meant to embarrass the older, more hierarchical ones. That's how it worked in the beginning. But this system of "jurisdictional competition" has been in collapse since the middle of the 20th century. The sharpest inflection was the New Deal. Federal grants-in-aid, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all wired state budgets to Washington so thoroughly that by 2020, a third of state spending came from federal transfers. Once every state depends on the same revenue streams and administers the same programs, meaningful policy differentiation narrows to the cosmetic. Four forces deepened the collapse after that: - The Supreme Court incorporated most of the Bill of Rights through the 14th Amendment, binding states to uniform constitutional norms. - Federal preemption under the Commerce Clause let OSHA, EPA, and DOE set standards that left states room to vary only at the margins. - National media and consumer culture homogenized the country in ways that made jurisdictional identity feel outdated. - And the professionalization of bureaucracy created a class of administrators whose training, incentives, and career paths were national rather than local. The compound republic became, for practical purposes, unitary. Now, some of this was morally necessary. The Founders' competitive system applied in practice only to free people, and the jurisdictional competition that followed included the freedom of states to enforce slavery and Jim Crow. No serious person wants to restore that. What incorporation did, at its best, was establish a floor of rights below which no state could fall. My argument is for restoring the range of meaningful differentiation above that floor. Below it, the competition is illegitimate, and above it, the atrophy has been catastrophic. When jurisdictions stop competing, they stop innovating. They stop being accountable. They become administrative franchises of a central authority, varying only in climate and cost of living. Citizens lose the most powerful disciplinary tool they have: the credible threat of departure. There are signs the system is waking up. Covid triggered the most visible jurisdictional sorting in decades. @FrancisSuarez and @MayorAdler competed openly for California and New York's talent (Suarez giving a masterclass). @GregAbbott_TX’s Texas became the landing zone for people like @elonmusk @JTLonsdale and @DavidSacks, while @RonDeSantis’s Florida pulled @rabois (since recaptured) and Ken Griffin. And these are just the big names. Governors began marketing their states as ideological propositions. Abortion, firearms, climate policy, education: states are diverging sharply on all of them. "California versus Texas" mirrors "Massachusetts versus Pennsylvania" circa 1780, at least structurally. But if the 1780s competition was about political economy: land, taxes, franchise rules, the terms on which you could build a life, the current divergence is heavily cultural and identity-driven. Fifty laboratories generating genuine knowledge about which policies serve human flourishing, under conditions where citizens can compare results and move accordingly: that is Madisonian competition. Two Americas retreating into ideological bunkers is factional sorting, which is what Madison warned against in Federalist 10. I'm not sure which one of those we are building. So why is it good that Larry and Sergey left? Not because the wealth tax is good. That much is clear to me. But because if your government becomes oppressive or incompetent or ceases to meet with your vision for the good life, you can leave. Madison said as much in Federalist 46. This multiplicity of jurisdictions and the competition among them is the immune system of republican liberty. Jurisdictional competition has been dormant for half a century. We are at the nadir. Reawakening it would change the trajectory of the country more than any single election. *** Thanks to @bgurley for an (Austin-based) coffee chat about this. (views / mistakes mine)