FACT & COMMENT // STEVE FORBES

Civil War II? California’s fevered fantasies.

The movement afoot in California to have the state secede from the Union— advocates call it Calexit—is gaining publicity if not support. One poll shows 32% of Democrats ready to vote yes on a pullout referendum. Petition signatures are being collected to get the question of ditching the good ol’ U.S.A. put on the ballot. One secession-advocate group has received financial support from—you guessed it— Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The whole idea is preposterous. The U.S. isn’t the EU. This union was meant from the start to be perpetual, and even today’s history-challenged citizens may recall what happened in 1861, when 11 states took a contrary view. This whole thing is symptomatic of the tense—if not hysterical—state of American politics today. (Indeed, the whole world seems to be flying apart, especially Europe.)

Meanwhile, secession or no, the Golden State, led by Governor Jerry Brown, is threatening to withhold money from Washington if the Trump Administration follows through on its promise to defund “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with federal officials in enforcing immigration laws, particularly identifying alleged criminals. Brown has boisterously bellowed that if Washington tries such a thing, California will become a sanctuary state.

Such selective defiance—ignoring national laws we don’t like—by Brown et al., has a rather sordid history. It was once known as “nullification,” a doctrine propagated in the 1820s by arch-slavery-apologist John C. Calhoun, who posited that a state had the right to nullify federal laws it considered “wrong” and “obnoxious.” While Calhoun saw nullification as a weapon to preserve slavery, he originally conjured up the idea in response to a tariff bill Congress had enacted that slammed a variety of imports with new or increased taxes. Southerners, far more dependent on imports than manufacturing Northerners, were outraged and labeled the legislation the “Tariff of Abominations.” Calhoun, who was vice president at the time, went further than verbal opposition and got his home state of South Carolina to declare the law null and void in the Palmetto State. Customs agents in the port of Charles- ton wouldn’t collect the new duties; thus, what historians came to call the Nullification Crisis was under way.

Calhoun’s nominal boss, President Andrew Jackson, who possessed a sulfuric temper (he once killed a man in a duel), threatened to personally hang Calhoun and send federal troops into South Carolina to enforce the new law, just as President George Washington had done in rural Pennsylvania in 1794, when he dispatched an army to enforce the recently enacted—and highly unpopular—excise taxes on whiskey. A face-saving deal was made whereby Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers backed down after some minor tariff modifications were made. Calhoun was spared the gallows, South Carolina didn’t face a hostile federal army (until the concluding months of the Civil War in 1865), and President Jackson preserved the integrity of the Union.

There have been two other big nullifying movements, as well as some minor ones, in our history. The first one, tragically, achieved success for several decades. After the Civil War, male African-americans had the right to vote in Southern states (women didn’t get the franchise until 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment). By the late 1890s most of those men had been illegally disenfranchised. Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted was this profound wrong righted.

The second nullification campaign was the so-called Massive Resistance response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring forced school segregation by race to be unconstitutional. The resisters were ultimately defeated, starting with President Eisenhower’s use of federal troops to enforce a school desegregation decision in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.

Will Jerry Brown have any more success with President Trump than Calhoun did with Jackson? Not likely. As a Louisiana governor once quipped to a massive resister, “The feds have got the bomb.” But a genuine showdown would have ugly consequences, inflaming tensions even more and making achieving a consensus on various immi-

gration reforms impossible.

Even though outright secession isn’t in the cards, the Golden State today is ripe for demagogic mischief. California has always felt it was different from the rest of the country, priding itself on being in the vanguard of social, economic and cultural trends. Millions of Americans saw it as the land of opportunity and moved there because of its beauty, benign climate, rapid growth and lifestyle diversity. It had everything: Hollywood, high tech, manufacturing, mobility, aerospace, oil, bountiful agriculture, and abundant and affordable housing.

But in recent times the state has become a tax and regulatory backwater, imitating the worst practices of stagnant Europe and such global powerhouses as Argentina. Bureaucrats in Sacramento have worked hard to crush small businesses with silly and costly rules, such as mandating mandatory time off for employees after four hours of labor. Minimum-wage laws unrelated to reality proliferate. No environmental rule or law is too inane, no matter how unrelated to science or conditions in the real world. Such decrees are ruining agriculture. With a straight face, regulators are issuing edicts to reduce effluents from cows, in the name of saving the planet from overheating.

The state’s water shortages are selfinflicted: Billions of gallons are flushed into the ocean, because that supposedly helps preserve a tiny, endangered smelt; new reservoirs aren’t built, and existing ones are attacked as unnatural. While Israel rapidly built state-of-the-art desalination plants, California dawdled for 15 years before a far smaller and more expensive one came online. It’s no surprise that places like San Francisco have banned plastic bags and are taxing paper ones, and are contemplating prohibiting free soda refills at restaurants. (The quality of life in San Francisco has deteriorated, with residents being constantly accosted by ever more aggressive panhandlers.)

Regulations have turned California from a housing mecca for working people into a high-cost hell. Its school system, once one of the nation’s best, is now a national laughingstock.

With its low thresholds, California’s income tax system slams workers hard. An individual making as little as around $41,000 a year finds himself in a higher bracket than the richest find themselves in almost all other income-tax states. California boasts the highest state income tax rate in the country: 13.3%. In 2016 three pro-tax referendums were passed.

Other economic sins include banning fracking, even though the state is rich in natural gas, while looking favorably on a proposed north-south bullet train that could cost well over $100 billion (estimates rise on an almost daily basis) to carry far fewer passengers than originally projected.

A few years ago voters approved a weird election system that rivals Louisiana’s. In 2016 the two U.S. senatorial candidates in the general election were Democrats; no Republican was on the ballot.

No wonder most business owners say they’d prefer to be elsewhere. Companies such as Nestlé USA, Toyota, Northrop Grumman and the parent company of Carl’s Jr. have moved their headquarters to friendlier climes. For the first time ever, the state is suffering out-migration. The middle class is shrinking.

Thanks to Silicon Valley and a few other oases, California is experiencing a mild economic uptick. Unfortunately, this is the equivalent of a bear-market rally. Lousy tax system, lousy regulatory climate, dysfunctional political system.

Thank goodness California can’t exit the U.S. It would impoverish its people and become a North American version of Greece.

Some say instead of Calexit the Golden State should be split into two or three new states. That’s also a nonstarter. Treating state borders like ever changing jigsaw puzzles is no substitute for a state’s voters making needed changes or doing what unhappy Americans have always been wont to do: pull up stakes and start anew somewhere else.

fda— stop Blowing smoke

One area of rampant regulatory abuse the Trump Administration should attack is the war against e-cigarettes. “Vaping” has been a godsend for people who are trying to quit smoking. It gives users the kick from nicotine without inhaling all the tars and other substances that make smoking cigarettes so lethal. Yet a perverse mind-set reigns among health regulators and fanatical antismoking crusaders: Against all honest scientific evidence, they equate vaping with lighting up actual cigarettes. They claim, with no credible justification, that e-cigarettes are a gateway to the real thing.

In August 2016, the FDA issued a rule severely hampering the continued improvement in vaping devices. It decreed that all devices made after February 2007 would now be subject to regulatory approval, adding huge costs and inhibiting innovation. The products of a decade ago were vastly inferior to those on the market today.

While the Trump rule-liberators are at it, they should also push for the elimination of two other regulations. One concerns the making of boutique or premium cigars by small manufacturers. The effect of this ruling enormously increases costs for these micro-cigar-makers by subjecting them to a wholly unnecessary approval process for new blends.

The other capricious diktat encompasses new rules that require tobacconists who mix pipe tobaccos in their shops to undergo an FDA registration process, as though they were tobacco manufacturers.

avenging toxic Harry

When he was in the U.S. Senate, Harry Reid (D–nevada) stopped the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository from being opened for use by utilities and the federal government. The facility had passed all the tests for safety, but Reid obstinately mothballed it, instead continuing the practice of storing radioactive material all around the country. Thankfully, no terrorist raids were mounted on these deadly wastes.

The Trump Administration should get the Yucca Mountain facility ready for operation—then declare that it henceforth be known as the Harry M. Reid Nuclear Waste Repository.