Now Playing: ‘The Orange County Rag’ : No more free lunch, courtesy of federal and state socialism-- residents must pay up or suffer.

Orange County is certifiable and therefore provides a wonderful model of where the Republican revolution is headed. By certifiable I mean only that the county consistently gives Republican presidential candidates their greatest margin of victory in the nation--so it’s certifiably Republican.

Now, Republicans, including the entire Orange County congressional delegation, are determined to transfer power from the federal to local governments through block grants and other such measures. That’s also how the Gingrich revolutionaries propose to balance the budget. Yet in Orange County, the predominantly Republican voters don’t trust the county supervisors, all of whom are Republican, to administer a miserable half-cent sales tax increase to get the county out of deep debt. Odd that they would trust those same fellows to administer billions in block grants.

Odd too is the propensity of Republicans, who just love balanced budgets, to run up enormous public debts, be it Reagan/Bush in Washington or their disciples in Orange County. It used to be that conservatives believed in paying their debts, but now a majority of voters in the county want to walk away from the billions owed to private vendors, investors and schoolchildren. They claim that the supervisors are responsible for the debt and that the voters are not responsible for the supervisors.

Although I lived in Orange County for 10 years, I must have missed something. I thought we voters were responsible for electing those supervisors--so why aren’t we responsible for the debt they piled up? Am I the only one who will admit to having voted for one of those Republican supervisors? Well, I did--it seemed like the thing to do.

To be fair, the anti-tax conservatives do have a plan for paying off the debt--sell the Brooklyn Bridge. Sorry, I meant the John Wayne Airport, but I couldn’t get the words out--selling John Wayne sounds so sacrilegious. Maybe you could sell the immense statue of Wayne that graces the airport, the way they sell Lenin artifacts in Eastern Europe. But the airport is not the county’s to sell since the state and feds paid for much of it. Also, the capitalists who run the airlines have said they would revolt. And if you think it’s hard to sell the airport, try the anti-tax gang’s Plan B, which is to show potential investors the joy of ownership in a county garbage dump.

An outsider might draw from all this that county residents, being rugged individualists or at least effete libertarians, don’t like government. But that suggests another mystery: How is that so many in the county submit to a degree of community coercion that must have been modeled on Fidel Castro’s neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution? As far as I know, the Woodbridge Homeowners Assn. is still after me for an unauthorized geranium.

They love order and government in Orange County. They just hate to admit it. It’s a tradition that started with Judge James William Towner, the “Bible communist,” who was the county’s first elected official a century ago and who sternly ordered the street grid for Santa Ana and many other communal rules.

There wouldn’t even be an Orange County were it not for the locals in Santa Ana bribing enough members of the Legislature to permit breaking this piece of scrubland off from Los Angeles County. Nor did it become much more than a grazing area until the state and feds paid enormous sums to facilitate the shipment of water and build freeways.

The big boost came in the 1960s with the defense industry. Orange County as we know it is the creation of socialist planning for the military-industrial complex. That and a huge government investment in education. The fine public school systems, now enfeebled by this debt, have long been the main selling point for real estate agents. Without the state plunking UC Irvine down in the middle of nowhere, the cows of Irvine Ranch would still be listening to the asparagus grow.

What the county has to come to grips with is that the free lunch catered by federal and state governments is over. Local taxes have to be raised or government services cut. The majority in the county has consistently refused to do either, which is why elected officials were forced into financial shenanigans to cover the shortfall. It won’t work anymore. The true keepers of the conservative faith on Wall Street have served notice. It’s the same message that the IMF sends to Poland: Somebody has got to pay for the good life and that somebody has got to be you. Put it to music and call it “The Orange County Rag.”