George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my 6may11 KVMR radio commentary broadcast earlier tonight.]

The spate of serious articles, reports, analyses, and commentaries on California’s disaster-in-progress reached a new plateau this last week with the prestigious (23apr11) Economist featuring a major survey of the state.  The world’s oldest international ‘newspaper’ traces California’s problems back to the start on its road to a “dysfunctional democracy”.  Students of history learn early that almost all democracies become dysfunctional sooner or later.  California’s experiment with direct democracy has implemented the ‘sooner’ option that has taken less than forty years.

Wiley politicians know that they can become comfortable wards of the state with sinecure jobs when they successfully pander to the voter that it is his direct voice that should be heard in the halls of the state capitol.  In California direct democracy allowed our elected representatives to duck the high hard decisions through referendums, initiatives, and propositions.

A referendum allows us voters to gainsay the legislature by going through a second step of accepting or rejecting a legislative proposal or law already on the books.  An initiative allows the citizens through a petition, or legislators directly to put a measure on the ballot.  This puts the onus of passage or rejection on the electorate and leaves the elected representatives unaccountable for the result.  A proposition is simply a stronger form of an initiative or legislative measure that the powers that be decide should be placed on the ballot for an up/down vote.

To these three, the California voters have also added the power of direct recall of elected officials.  In short, we voters can do damn near anything we want through the ballot box that affects our governance.  But can we really?

Democracy comes in many flavors and its effectiveness depends on the demographics of the population that succumb to its siren song.  Switzerland has been one such siren song with its stable near-democracy lasting for centuries.  But the few homogeneous cultures of that land, its even economy, and its small size has allowed its democracy to work.  Where democracy reliably fails, is when it is attempted by larger populations composed of many cultures and opportunities for a wide range of incomes.

Our Founders knew all this way back in the 18th century, and fashioned for us instead a representative democracy or republic.  The republican form of government would have the voters elect representatives who would become better informed about matters of state, and through their deliberations temper the volatile “passions” of the electorate.  In the last decades California voters have witnessed their passions play out in the ballot box with disastrous results.

Today we see the country and many of its states in a headlong rush toward pure democracy.  Madison wrote, “Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, and have in general been short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”  Does that remind anyone of what is happening in Sacramento?
 
Two major forces – money and the Peter/Paul Principle – immediately come into play when the people directly assume the reins.  The overwhelming number of voters are dismally uninformed and under-educated about issues and alternatives.  They are primarily grist for the message mill that dispenses bite-sized slogans whose repetition and extent are limited only by the funds available to pay for the trumpets.  Enter the well-funded special interests.

We all know that when you promise to rob Peter to pay Paul, you will have the full support of the Pauls.  The manifest result of this is that 51% of Americans today pay no federal income tax as reported this week by the Associated Press.  Just 20% of Americans pay two thirds of all income taxes.  In California over 50% of state revenues comes from income taxes collected from Californians, and of that the overwhelming amount comes from the mobile ‘rich’.

In its landmark assessment of California’s democracy, the Economist observes that “more than 100 of the initiatives of the past two decades promised something for nothing, such as cutting a tax or expanding a service.”  With such a large fraction of Californians paying no income tax at all, this has been the Peter/Paul Principle on steroids.  And the end is nowhere in sight – witness the recent passage of California’s devastating AB32 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Act.  It was vindicated last November with the failure of Proposition 23 which sought to curb some of its excesses.

Reactions to our dysfunctional democracy are gaining strength.  There is a movement to hold a constitutional convention – the last one was in 1879 – and possibly start again with a clean slate.  And there has also formed the Think Long Committee for California, a gathering of the state’s political luminaries commissioned to draft a string of initiatives whose passage is supposed to reset the state onto its former prosperous course.

KVMR listeners should inform themselves on both alternatives because “in the next few years California might see the liveliest debate on freedom and governance since federalists and anti-federalists argued in 1787 and 88” over our new constitution.  Exciting times.

My name is Rebane and I also expand on these and other themes in my Union columns, on NCTV, and on georgerebane.com where this transcript appears.  These opinions are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.