Tarnished View of California in Forbes

They’re variations of the chicken-egg question we’re likely to hear much more frequently as the country sinks into recession: which comes first, employers or jobs; prosperity or “livability?”

In its Oct. 29 cover story, Forbes magazine asks “Is the Golden State Losing It?” The article argues that, indeed, California is casually kissing off its $150-billion-a-year manufacturing industry. Preoccupied with more and more foolish regulatory measures, the state’s citizens and lawmakers remain oblivious to the increasing numbers of manufacturers who are packing up and heading north or east or to the Southern states, the article’s authors assert.

“Basking in the glow from decades of easy growth, Californians lost sight of the fact that in a free enterprise system, companies are not only free to come but also free to go,” the article says. “They are going because the drawbacks of doing business in California are fast overwhelming the advantages of doing business there. The cost curve has finally overtaken the advantage curve.”

Those costs include housing that is beyond the reach of 82% of U.S. households or, alternatively, long commutes that translate into increased absenteeism; workers compensation rates that are as much as 50% higher than in other states; higher construction expenses; and schools that rank 49th among states for the ratio of students to teachers.

But the real villain, in these authors’ view, is California’s “bewildering array of environmental regulations and anti-growth propositions.”

The economic impact of increased environmentalism demands close analysis. It doesn’t get it in this old-fashioned business booster tract, which occasionally lapses into the sort of quaint diatribe that had been unfashionable since the days of Spiro Agnew.

The article points out, for instance, that 3 million poor Latinos and Asians are likely to arrive in California in the next decade. “They are not likely to find work selling annuities in Santa Monica or real estate in Marin County. But none of this much bothers the state’s small but visible and vociferous legion of limousine liberals, Hollywood headline grabbers and tree huggers, people who have never seen the inside of a manufacturing plant and have little real sympathy for the blue-collar types who are hurt by their activities.”

The article has nothing but sympathy for the beleaguered manufacturers, who in spite of what is portrayed as infinite concern for workers, move their companies out of state anyway.

For all its legitimate hand-wringing over the loss of industry, Forbes offers no solutions to the underlying problems. In one paragraph the article chastises the South Coast Air Quality Management District for fining a business that failed to come up with a car pool plan. Two paragraphs later, it criticizes authorities for constraining industrial emissions rather than attacking the two-thirds of Southern California’s pollution caused by car and truck emissions.

What the article never mentions is that very few Southern Californians say they’re leaving the state because they can’t find work. Plenty say they would like to leave because they’re sick of the pollution.

It may or may not be coincidental that the following article in the magazine is titled “Tom Hayden, Meet Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas.” The premise of this piece is that environmentalism is a religion and so businessmen should not count on dealing with environmentalists in rational terms.

The article is written by the author of a book called “Modern Economic Theology.” But the author does not here acknowledge that bottom-line economics might also be considered a religion, or that the difference between his approach to the world and that of some environmentalists pivots on whether one chooses to worship trees, or the green icons made from their pulp: money.

REQUIRED READING

In Saudi Arabia, journalists complain that the military’s public relations machinery is making coverage of Operation Desert Shield about as credible as a fanzine’s coverage of the New Kids on the Block. In October’s The Washington Monthly, editor Scott Shuger reports on the F-117 Stealth fighter’s performance in Panama. The Air Force has one public affairs specialist for every four planes it owns and, Shuger explains, these specialists specialty is the old-fashioned runaround.

Initial reports from the military PR machine declared the Stealth’s mission in Panama a complete success and trumpeted the plane’s “pinpoint accuracy.” In truth, Shuger reports, the planes were no more accurate than the military’s statements to the press, missing one target completely and inadvertently blowing up a saloon.

The mission succeeded anyway, but that’s not the point, Shuger writes.

“The issue is not whether the mistakes (in Panama) kept that mission from achieving its objective. It’s whether they easily could have kept it from achieving it--if the Panamanians had been a little better trained, better organized, or better equipped; if they had been, say . . . the Iraqis. There are two ways of learning that the risk of military failure is too great. POWS, widows, and orphans know all about one of them. The press is the other.”

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

Western capitalists have not been meek about charging into the Soviet magazine market. Paris Match has just launched a new, all Russian-language general interest magazine, which is being test marketed in New York City after the 250,000 press run sold out in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile the November Ladies’ Home Journal features a Russian-language section, complete with illustrated exercise routines and Soviet models posing provocatively in perfume ads.

SHREDDER FODDER

Last year, P.J. O’Rourke’s acerbic “Joe McCarthy Memorial New Enemies List,” with its red-baiting of everything and everyone liberal, was so tastelessly funny in parts it might have caused even Tom Hayden to involuntarily spout UFW-picked organic blush wine through his nose.

For this year’s version, in the November American Spectator, O’Rourke merely prints a rambling list of conservative complaints submitted by readers that even crackpot survivalist newsletters would reject--not because of political content, but because they are banal, ham-handed and stupid.