People's frustration with the government can arise over something as simple as a pothole.
Last spring, we noticed a large pothole had developed right where our dirt road meets the highway; that's hardly uncommon, as our harsh winters are hard on roads, paved and unpaved. The borough maintains a website where we can report things like this, and sometimes the Borough Council even gets around to getting them fixed. This works, generally speaking, because 1) government works best when it's closest to the taxpayers, and 2) Alaskans living, as we do, "out in the borough," often just go ahead and handle these things ourselves. But that's not the way it works in places like, oh, California.
Government, in a properly organized society, should be minimal. It should take from the taxpayers what it needs to carry out certain distributed interests, such as infrastructure, law enforcement, defense, and so forth. The government has one purpose: To protect the liberty and the property of the citizens. But in too many places, government is out of control; it's become a ravening beast, with an ever-increasing appetite for taxpayer money, even to the point where it's driving those taxpayers away.
Which brings me to California, and its proposed "wealth tax," which has some Silicon Valley tech billionaires looking to the exits.
Silicon Valley’s wealthiest residents are once again threatening to leave California, this time over a proposed state wealth tax that tech founders warn could fundamentally reshape where innovation — and capital — call home.
The proposal, backed by the Service Employees International Union–United Healthcare Workers West, would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of California residents worth more than $1 billion.
Supporters say the revenue could help offset federal funding cuts for healthcare.
This is a colossally stupid idea. If normal stupid were a planet, this level of stupid would be the entire Virgo Supercluster. At the federal level, the ravings of Democrats like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) aside, this would require a constitutional amendment, as did the income tax. But California could conceivably do this, and if it goes on a ballot, there may be enough coastal elites and dependency-class voters to put it over the top. The coastal elites can either afford it or can hide their wealth; the dependency class will, as always, be voting for Santa Claus, who is promising more of other people's stuff.
But in Silicon Valley, some tech billionaires are not enthused about having 5% of their often non-liquid wealth stripped away, and they're looking for an exit.
Palmer Luckey, cofounder of defense tech startup Anduril, said the tax would force "founders like me to sell huge chunks of our companies" to pay for what he described as "fraud, waste and political favors for the organizations pushing this ballot initiative."
"I made my money from my first company, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on it, used the remainder to start a second company that employs six thousand people and now me and my cofounders have to somehow come up with billions of dollars in cash," Luckey wrote on X.
Luckey’s comments come as billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel and Google co-founder Larry Page weigh whether to cut ties with "The Golden State" over the proposed ballot measure, according to a New York Times report.
Leaving, frankly, would be the best thing that the Silicon Valley tech titans could do. I hear Texas is a good place for business.
Read More: Supreme Court Clears the Way for a Wealth Tax Because Obamacare Was a Tax
Incentives Matter: Britain Is Raising Taxes, and the Productive Are Fleeing
It's the undying nature of government to grow ever bigger, ever more intrusive, ever more voracious. California is once more proving this out. It's already to the point where one can hardly find a U-Haul to take from California to Texas, Tennessee, or Florida, while renting one to go in the opposite direction can be done for pennies on what should normally be dollars. It's not enough, in California, that their productive pay the lion's share of taxes already; Sacramento's hunger won't be satiated.
And what do California voters get in return? The highest energy costs in the country. Cities are infested with huge homeless enclaves, where the mentally ill and addicted live in squalor. Some of the worst-maintained roads in the nation. A recently-dumped train to nowhere, which soaked up millions without one foot of rail laid.
The bigger and more expensive the government grows, the less efficient it becomes. In the end, the productive leave. The people whom leftists in government demonize, deride, and seek to soak at an ever-increasing rate with taxation eventually decide they've had enough. They're leaving California, they're leaving New York, they're leaving the blue states. In California, this idiotic wealth tax may be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Atlas is shrugging, and the flight isn't to some mythical valley in Colorado, but to Dallas, to Fort Worth, to Fort Lauderdale, to Nashville.
Remember that pothole? In the end, we didn't bother the borough. My neighbor had a pile of gravel he was using to patch his driveway. I spoke to him about the pothole; we loaded my tractor's front-end bucket with gravel, drove it down to the end of the road, filled in the pothole, and smoothed it over with honest old spades. Problem solved.
We can't always rely on the government. But we can always rely on ourselves. And the advantage in that is that we don't have to have a big portion of our wealth confiscated and run through multiple levels of bureaucracy, with each level siphoning off cash, just to get a pothole filled.
