According to Gavin Newsom, everything is going great in California and it’s all thanks to government. Anyone who has paid attention certainly knows better.
“California’s success is not by chance, it’s by design,” said the governor in his final State of the State address before the Legislature on Thursday. “We’ve created the conditions where dreamers and doers and misfits and marvels with grit and ingenuity come to build the impossible.”
That sounds like something out of a Hallmark card, but what it underscores is Newsom’s view that government intervention is the key to prosperity and innovation.
Newsom is certainly right that California is a great state and an economic engine unmatched by other states. But that’s often in spite of, not because of, government design.
Indeed, “by design,” California is a state that brought the hammer down on independent contractors with ridiculous laws like Assembly Bill 5, which he signed.
“By design” the “dreamers and doers” he speaks of are constantly operating under risk that Sacramento will impose new costs, new mandates and new restrictions on what they can do.
“By design” California is a place where business owners big and small are routinely shaken down by trial lawyers and serial litigants.
“By design” California’s energy policies make it more and more expensive every year for people and businesses to do business or get to work.
And “by design” California’s tax system punishes the “dreamers and doers” for their success so some politicians in Sacramento can set that money on fire.
Newsom further revealed the limits of his rationality with his remarks on the high-speed rail boondoggle.
Voters in 2008 approved bond funding for a project linking Los Angeles and San Francisco that was supposed to be operational by now. Here in 2026, the first segment linking Bakersfield and Merced is still years away.
Having tripled in cost and fallen far behind schedule, high-speed rail defenders have insisted we focus on the jobs the project creates. Newsom has found himself in this camp.
“I’m proud of Fresno. I’m proud of Madera. I’m proud of Bakersfield. Those are communities we shouldn’t be talking down to. Those are communities we shouldn’t be talking past. This is one of the great economic investments in those regions of our state,” he said.
Yes, bullet train discourse is down to, “Don’t pick on Fresno, they need the jobs.”
It brings to mind a well-known story among economics and free market enthusiasts about the late Milton Friedman and his visit to China.
“[Friedman] was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels,” the story goes as told by Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton responded, ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!’”
That Newsom has now succumbed to this line of argument underscores that he’s much less of an innovative leader than he wants people to think he is.
A true leader thinking toward the future would have at bare minimum terminated the project, gone back to the drawing board and considered better uses of finite dollars.
Everything else in the speech was to be expected. For example, he boasted of a projected $27,000 per pupil state education budget. Of course, on his watch, a majority of California students still can’t read or do math at grade-appropriate levels and now many of the incoming students in our prestigious University of California system can’t either.
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Stark contrast between mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco Critics draw iffy link between Gavin Newsom’s record and Minnesota’s food fraud scandal Susan Shelley: Rocket fuel for fraud—the high cost of the COVID pandemic Maduro is out. Whether that serves U.S. interests remains to be seen. Sal Rodriguez: MAGA seems to always need a scapegoat He touted his support for Big Labor. He boasted of his job-killing fast food minimum wage mandate. Though curiously he avoided naming his cronies in the California Correctional Peace Officers Association on whom he’s showered taxpayer money as governor in exchange for their political support.On one objectively good point he raised — news that California’s unsheltered homeless population dropped 9% last year — is of course covered in asterisks. For example, the homeless population surged from 151,000 in 2019 to 187,084 by 2024. As many died on the streets, government couldn’t manage to coordinate how it spent money to deal with the problem.
Government responses to homelessness have been anything but inspiring. They’ve been too little, too late, too poor.
“That’s the California way, and it lights the path for the rest of the world,” Newsom declared. He may be right, but not in the way he thinks. He hasn’t designed a model for success — he’s illuminated how not to run a state.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].
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