California’s Prop. 31: The Revolution Will Not Be Publicized

We are two months away from fundamentally transforming the State of California, and barely anyone knows it. With a five to six point lead in the latest poll, Proposition 31 has a solid shot at passage. The measure is meant to bail out California’s failing cities by creating regional super-governments empowered to raid and redistribute suburban tax money. It’s the end of the system of local self-government that has served as the bedrock of American democracy since the time of the Founders — in the nation’s largest state, no less. Yet virtually no one is paying attention.

Proposition 31 allows collections of local governments to pool their tax receipts. While this “tax sharing” is supposedly voluntary, the initiative sets up rewards and punishments that effectively force California’s local governments to submit to redistribution, or accept second-class status instead. Once California’s municipalities have been swallowed up by de facto regional super-governments, citizens will come under the thumb of officials unelected by the public they control. We’re looking at redistribution without representation, an Americanized version of the undemocratic financial and political arrangements currently killing the European Union.
Yet few of the voters who favor or oppose Proposition 31 understand any of this. While the measure remakes California in the image of the controversial “regional equity movement,” it’s being sold and debated on entirely different grounds. Prop. 31 is a kind of mini-Obamacare, an eye-glazingly long, complex, and multi-faceted initiative that voters may actually pass before finding out what’s inside.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/316404/californias-prop-31-revolution-will-not-be-publicized-stanley-kurtz