The Friday wrap-up of the 2014 legislative session brought passage of the ban on plastic bags, mandatory paid sick days,new groundwater regulations, more gun control, expanded tax breaks for Hollywood,and bilingual education bills. The Democrat-majority of the California Legislature has made it clear it honors only the interests of labor unions, trial lawyers, environmentalists and liberals politicians. And that’s it.

Gone is any pretext of concern for taxpayers, business owners and employers, or any respect for free enterprise and free markets.

The left has shown an historic distrust in free enterprise and free markets, and instead relied on socialism to artificially make market “corrections” following downturns, largely due to government intervention, heavy-handed regulations and manipulations.

California is a state whose politicians,… Read More

A devastating labor union-friendly bill authored by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, which did not pass the Legislature last year, is back, with amendments.SB 25would force a farming employer into “collective bargaining,” which actually is an order written by an arbitrator who forces it on the employer and employees against their will.

If SB 25 is signed into law, the waningUnited Farm Workers labor union stands to triple in size.

It is apparent labor unions are trying to gain what they can no longer win through the secret ballot process and sincere labor negotiations, with agriculture employers. The UFW… Read More

Destroy the middle class in America, and Socialism takes over – economic growth is killed, people turn on each other, free speech is attacked, the government grows and becomes more tyrannical, and individuals are not treated equally under the law.And, subsidies grow as it becomes more “profitable” not to work, and trade effort for leisure.

Are we there?

Corporations and special interest groups fund politicians in return for favorable treatment by government, which leads to regulations on the rest of small businesses and working society.

The Obama… Read More

Gov. Jerry Brown announced Tuesday he’d like to build shelters for the thousands of young immigrants from Central America, currently illegally flooding California’s southern borders.

However, this is the same Jerry Brown who in 1975 complained vociferously about the Federal government plan to “dump Vietnamese on” California after the fall of Saigon.

This week Brown said, “Certainly I’d do everything I could to make sure California will do its part to shelter any young children that are in need of protection,” Brown told reporters.

However, in 1975, Brown had a very different view on large groups of homeless, foreign refugees; “We can’t be looking 5,000 miles away and at the same time neglecting people who live here,” Brown said about Vietnamese refugees, Breitbart’s Kerry Picket… Read More

State of the Economy, Part 3 – “Increasing Income Disparity”: Last week, I laid out for you the case that “income inequality” should really be called “increasing income disparity” and suggested that it is a worldwide phenomenon. I also debunked commonly expressed “solutions” for this problem you often hear from leaders in Washington. However, I have not yet presented solutions of my own. Before I do, let’s first examine the factors at work here that I believe are causing this phenomenon.

There were a number of serious recessions during the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No one alive today has ever talked to anyone who experienced the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So, with the exception of historians, it doesn’t get as much coverage in contemporary discussion as say, the Great Depression. What you may not know is that the Industrial Revolution caused a large job displacement at first. When the jobs on the farm went away, they were not immediately replaced in a factory. It took time before people figured out what to do with the extra disposable… Read More

Does a salary increase of 17.6 percent translate into 17.6 percent better job performance? Chances are, it does not.

The Los Angeles Unified School District and Service Employees International Union recently cut a dubious deal to increase 33,000 minimum-wage non-teaching workers’ pay to $15 an hour, nearly doubling some workers’ salaries. I wrote about it July 7 in “Dubious Deal Between Los Angeles School… Read More

The California Air Resources Board is a state agency completely out of control. With no oversight by the Legislature, as the California Constitution calls for, Mary Nichols, ARB Chairman, is setting policy on behalf of this regulatory body, for the entire state.

ARB Goes It Alone

The ARB has taken a great deal of liberty, particularly with its interpretation of AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. TheARB devised a cap-and-trade system whereby it holds a quarterly auction program “requiring many California employers to bid significant amounts of money for the privilege of continuing to emit carbon dioxide — or be faced with closing their doors in California, laying… Read More

Sinclair Lewis wrote “It Can’t Happen Here” in 1935, a fictional story about a populist state Senator who is elected President on

campaign promises of economic and social reforms, and a return to patriotism and traditional values. After winning the presidency by appealing to the interests of ordinary Americans, the new President instead takes over the government, imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. The new President’s government abolishes women’s and minority rights, and eliminates states’ rights by subdividing the country into federal administrative sectors. The new government imposes statist control of all aspects of… Read More