California Dreamin’

It has been a scorching day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.

California has come to be rich because

• full of orange groves, it used to be cheap;
• noncompetes were not enforced;
• the government contracts were generous to the Silicon Valley chipmakers when no one but the government could afford to buy chips;
• since its inception, Stanford has had an applied, industry-friendly bend, letting the knowledge bleed over into the Valley;
• the Silicon Valley culture of not contractually binding employees to their firm has ensured that the firm’s CEO is there for the employees rather than the other way around;
• L.A. has the sunshine.

California remains rich because

• the critical mass of talent has been amassed; the chain reaction of minds that stimulate each other to invent and create has been set in motion and cannot be easily extinguished;
• used to miracles and accustomed to not judge by appearances, California (mostly L.A.) has come to tolerate misfits, who arrive from all over and feed the chain reaction or simply provide the reassurance that it is OK to be different.

(There is a discontinuity at 100% conformism. One is drastically more miserable when conforming 100% than when conforming 99.99%. L.A. requires neither 100% no near-100% conformism, which makes L.A. a welcoming place.)

California’s prosperity is threatened by its dysfunctional politics. What seems to be happening is that as soon as someone wants something very much and has the indiscretion to let that on by trying very hard to realise one’s dream, parasites, middlemen, and charlatans promptly show up to tax, to blackmail, and to threaten to stop all good things unless conditions are met, thereby extracting or, worse, disrupting much of the value that the dreamers are capable of creating.

California is no “slow sort of country,” as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen would no doubt admit upon inspection. In California, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” One must run to stay ahead of competition. One must also run to stay ahead of the regulator. To do so, one must discover new domains of endeavour where one can create what other people want without the risk of being taxed, regulated, or otherwise interfered with excessively. To discover new domains, one can no longer move to unclaimed lands, not on Earth. Instead, one must discover an unexplored intellectual territory. California is lucky in that much of this discovery for historical reasons is still taking place on its soil.

Who are the middlemen who stand in the dreamers’ way? Some are legitimate taxmen, enforcers of the social contract. But there is only so much legitimate tax collection to go around. Others are power seekers, adherents of the inverted religion that legitimises the desire to worship ones’s own tastes and the desire to compel others to do so, instead of exercising meekness and worshiping god. So, the power seekers go on to build bike lanes, unsafe for drivers and cyclists alike. They compel you to swap the drivetrain of your car and then tell you whom to hire and where not to build. Because they can. They advocate taxation as a means to inflict pain on the taxed rather than as a part of a well-reasoned plan to mitigate the suffering of the untaxed masses. The California homeless problem is not improving, and not for lack of ritualistic sacrifice. The power seekers believe the world owes them: if not in goods and services then at least in ceasing to exist happily.

One can get high on power by creating something that the consumer wants. Or one can get high on power by withholding others’ creations from the consumer. The art of the well-designed constitution and the social norms that it engenders is to coordinate on the outcome in which there is more of the former and less of the latter kind of exercise of power.

Running faster in order to keep in the same place is how countries become rich. Maybe the future generations will thank the present parasites for forcing the dreamers to always dream one step ahead of the regulator and to dream big. Or maybe the future generations will not be there because the invention of the technology that would have enabled their ancestors’ survival will be regulated out of existence.

Thank you kindly.