California's Prop. 31: One Small Step for Democrats, One Giant Leap Down the Road to Totalitarianism

Writing in National Review, author Stanley Kurtz describes California's Proposition 31 as "robbing the suburbs to pay for the cities."

Consider it three ominous portents of the radical Left's redistributionist agenda: to force more and more people into urban centers; to reduce mankind's greedy use of energy; and to greatly restrict personal freedom of movement (it's mass transit for you, bubba):

California’s Proposition 31 is the project of a collection of “good government” groups, in particular, California Forward. California Forward says its goal is “fundamental change.” They’re right about that. The change they have in mind, unfortunately, is creating a collection of de facto regional super-governments designed to undercut the political and economic independence of California’s suburbs. The goal is to redistribute suburban tax money to California’s failing cities.

Instead of taking on the mismanagement that is breaking California’s cities, Prop. 31 lets failing cities bail themselves out by raiding the pocketbooks of California’s suburbanites. In the process, Prop. 31 will kill off the system of local government at the root of American liberty.

...How does Prop. 31 work? It allows local governments to join together to form “Strategic Action Plans.” Supposedly, this pooling of local municipal services into a kind of de facto collective regional super-government would be voluntary. In fact, Prop. 31 deploys powerful incentives to effectively force the creation of these regional super-governments. To begin with, municipalities that join regional collectives–and only those municipalities–can effectively waive onerous state laws and regulations by creating their own more lax versions of those rules. Next, Prop. 31 channels a portion of state sales tax revenue to municipalities that join regional governing collectives–and only those municipalities. Finally, Prop. 31 authorizes local governments participating in the regional collectives to pool their property-tax receipts...

...Proposition 31 is an offense against America’s most fundamental concepts of liberty and self-government.

Barack Obama is an ardent supporter of the anti-suburb movement. Just a few weeks ago, "A photo of President Obama was suddenly pulled from the website of the group Building One America."

For more than two decades, Obama and his fellow radical community activists, agitators have been working toward punishing all those people who voted with their feet and fled the cities and left them filled with only poor and minority residents. "Suburbs are for sellouts...For Obama, the suburbs are a defect in the very structure of American life. That is why the president backs his old friends' movement to abolish them."

"'We are battling apartheid in America.' So said Obama's onetime organizing mentor Mike Kruglik in 2005, explaining the philosophy behind his crusade for regional equity. At the the time, Kruglik was directing the regionalist efforts of the Gamaliel Foundation, a national network of community organizations that Obama himself had helped launch in the mid-1980s. Today Kruglik leads the Gamailied offshoot Building One American, which fights for regionalism in partnerships with the Obama White House, although few Americans have any idea that this is the case."

...[Obama and Kruglik] hope to achieve this basic change in America by expanding cities into regions that will all come under the control of the nearest cities. Obama and his allies consider everything about the suburbs to be bad. That's where the money has fled. That's where the SUV's and autos pollute the environment. That's where valuable farmland and forests are absorbed to build more urban sprawl. The suburbanites need to be dragged back into the cities and their love affair with the car crushed.

Mass transit is intended to stop the building of highways in order to help eliminate the use of automobiles.

Lest you think all of this sounds outlandish, I encourage you to tick off the rest of the items on the checklist.


Hat tip: JTT.