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Seriously? California is an economic powerhouse, wealthy beyond imagination. Argentina is a basket case with 50% of the population in deep poverty, collapsing industry and no way out of its debt cycle. Hayek was a fantasist, at best, and had zero understanding of economics.

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California's not wealthy because of all that red tape

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The way to combat bureaucratic sclerosis is to give Democrats time and majorities, not to embrace Hayek's crackpot theories.

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I feel like California has had Democratic majorities for a long time, and has only gotten worse.

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California is far from perfect, but a lot of its problems are because it has created so much wealth, making it very expensive to live there because so many really wealthy people want to live there. CA has the 6th largest economy in the world with a GDP of $4trillion - that's TRILLION. CA Gdp grew more than 6% last year. Argentina has a GDP of $600million which is shrinking. And I would never call CA government great, but it's stumbling forward - the state is slowly forcing communities to stop blocking housing growth for example. California did have a right wing state government that embraced austerity at one point - it ended up trying to pay bills with IOUs because austerity is terrible economic policy. I live in Texas, btw, where the Democratic cities drive the economy forward despite the best efforts of the Republican state government to destroy it.

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Again, the wealth generation in CA, is in spite of the state government policies not because of them (or at least not the recent ones)

Much of that wealth is generated by silicon valley. Silicon valley didn't happen because of CA red tape.

And of course a lot of people have historically wanted to live there because of the very nice weather.

But many people like my family have fled there in recent years. Tired of high costs, too much red tape, and high crime.

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That's simply false. Silicon valley happened because of government investment. Without Stanford, Berkeley, the UC schools etc, without DARPA funding, DOD purchase of chips, Lockheed, etc. and earlier WWII investment in Kaiser and other companies, there would be no Sili Valley. As for state government, you are welcome to pine for the Pete Wilson days when CA was bankrupt and trying to get vendors to accept IOUs, but it was not a good time. Government red tape is a problem, but it's there was a lot of red tape involved in building the tech industry.

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