“Lakewood is not really a suburb anymore, it’s a particular kind of urban place that looks suburban superficially but which is netted fully in an urban fabric,” says author D.J. Waldie who is most famous for writing Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, set in 1950s Lakewood, California.

Waldie sat down with Reason Magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch, who also grew up in Lakewood, to talk about city planning and the unique issues affecting suburbia in 2011. For 34 years, Waldie served as the Public Information Officer for the city of Lakewood and still lives in the house he grew up in.

The film rights to Holy Land were bought in late 2010 by actor James Franco for a possible movie.

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The Commerce Clause that regulates interstate commerce is at issue in the legal battle of Obamacare.  Can the federal government tell individuals that they must buy insurance?  Not as well known is how the same commerce clause is destroying farms and raising food prices by stopping the flow of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers to the Central Valley in California.      The feds at the urging of the state government has literally turned off the tap, destroying prime farmland in order to benefit the sex lives of the Delta Smelt.

Approximately 85-90% of the water from this primary source has been shut off to the Central Valley.   The smelt is a fish so insignificant that no one other than the Bezerkely-enviro-wackos and some local fisherman have heard about this tiny fish.

The smelt is fish that is native to California and, for the most part, is known to fisherman simply as “bait”.   The California enviros’ zeal to increase the population of smelt has led to a terrible federal, legal decision that shut down the water to thousands of farmers in the Central Valley; the nation’s largest and most productive farm land.    Thousands of farmers there are suffering with unemployment over 20%, scores of farms have been lost and tens of thousands of agricultural workers are now without jobs.   If California didn’t have enough economic problems, you can add shooting yourself in the foot.  The inmates are now officially running the asylum.   If we needed a poster for enviro-insanity it would be the promotion of the lowly smelt over the interests of: farmers, food production, food prices, jobs and California families.

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Thanks to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and a legal miscalculation by leftist environmentalists, this week a California judge stopped the implementation of California’s Cap and Trade law: better known as Cap and Tax. This is the same type of carbon trading that Al Gore has hawked for years, but failed to get through the most radical Democrat Congress in generations. That’s how bad it was. Of course, that didn’t stop whacked out California from passing a Draconian version of the same job killing scheme.

To add insult to injury, the so called “republican” Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill into law in 2006. It was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and most sane taxpayers (admittedly, CA doesn’t have enough of those). The opponents claimed that the law would drive out business to other states and dramatically increase the cost of energy. Energy costs would, of course, be passed on, driving up the cost of everything else-in the midst of the nation’s worst recession.

The voters of California even had an opportunity last year to put the brakes on it at the ballot box with Proposition 23, but the environmental left spent millions fighting the proposition. It wouldn’t even have scrapped the whole law, but only would have suspended the Cap and Tax until state unemployment dropped below 5.5% for four consecutive quarters. The proposition was defeated overwhelmingly. Considering our unemployment rate is well over 12% here, the California voters essentially supported assisted economic-suicide of their own state.

It took two forces working together to finally defeat Cap and Tax: a group of radical Lefties and Ronald Reagan to put the brakes on this law.

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I just returned from speaking to two terrific groups about California’s looming ballot initiative, Proposition 23, to delay implementation of the state’s climatically meaningless, economically suicidal state-level adoption of the Kyoto agenda, called AB 32.

On the flight out I pulled out my pocket Bastiat reader, which I carry everywhere but hadn’t re-read in a while. There, in the opening, brilliant essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” — a work that perfectly nails Obamanomics, and the entire ‘green jobs’ fallacy that is the latest re-branding of central planning (if in its most devastating form: mandating energy price hikes on top of generational debt) — I ran across a stunning reminder:

In noting what the state is going to do with the millions of francs voted, do not neglect to note also what the taxpayers would have done—and can no longer do—with these same millions. You see, then, that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. On one, the figure of a busy worker, with this device: What is seen; on the other, an unemployed worker, with this device: What is not seen. The sophism that I am attacking in this essay is all the more dangerous when applied to public works, since it serves to justify the most foolishly prodigal enterprises. When a railroad or a bridge has real utility, it suffices to rely on this fact in arguing in its favor. But if one cannot do this, what does one do? One has recourse to this mumbo jumbo: “We must create jobs for the workers.”This means that the terraces of the Champ-de-Mars are ordered first to be built up and then to be torn down. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing philanthropic work when he had ditches dug and then filled in. He also said: “What difference does the result make? All we need is to see wealth spread among the laboring classes.”

Spread the wealth around. So here we have Obamanomics in a nutshell.

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California is facing nearly The Toughest of Times.  We face historically high unemployment, perennial budget crises and more.  Don’t think it could get any worse?  Think again.  If Jerry Brown is elected, in one short stroke, he could deal a potentially crippling blow to the California economy before it gets a chance to get back on its feet.

Even for a committed political observer, volunteer and commentator such as myself, it seems implausible – but true – that the stakes for elections grow with each successive election.  For California, the 2010 gubernatorial election unquestionably could be the most important election ever – and not necessarily for a good reason.  If Jerry Brown is elected, he and his fellow Democrats could deliver a devastating blow to California.

We well know that California’s unemployment rate is above 12%.  We also know that well over 100,000 people are leaving California on a yearly basis.  Beyond that, California faces an exodus of businesses – large and small alike.  So it can be no surprise that state revenues have declined nearly $40 billion over the last three years as a result of the declining taxpayer base.

We also well know why California is having a tougher time than many other states.  In recent years, California is consistently ranked near the bottom of states in which to do business.  According to Joseph Vranich, president of JV Executive Consulting Inc. in Irvine:  “It’s no mystery what causes companies to leave California: High taxes, undue regulation, workers’ comp costs, a legal environment stacked against businesses and lengthy and costly construction permitting requirements.”  Indeed, California finished tied for last in the Country in Forbes’ Overall Tax Burden survey measuring tax burdens and structure.

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By all accounts, future job growth is going to be sluggish at best and we can expect double digit unemployment at least through next year.  The Democrats’ response is a $300 billion jobs program.  Many Republicans would rather rely on the private sector to fuel the recovery and job growth.  So what’s better, Government Force or Market Forces?

The use of the phrase Government Force is based on the nature of government programs.  The vast majority of the people would prefer to pay little or no taxes.  They are literally forced by government to pay those taxes.  As it relates to a jobs bill, the Democrats will tax one set of people or businesses (taxpayers) and/or borrow money (a delayed tax) and then transfer a portion of those collected/borrowed funds to other people or businesses.  In that manner, the Democrats believe they have created a job – or in today’s vernacular, saved a job.  But have they?

In the process of taxing some and transferring to others, the government force has taken money away from a business/taxpayer in California and perhaps given it to someone in Alabama.  That means the business in California cannot hire someone (or save a job) with the money transferred to Alabama – a type of zero sum game.  Actually, it is worse than a zero sum game because government always manages to waste money in the transfer and so Alabama is never helped so much as California is hurt.

Put another way, in an effort to fill Alabama’s bucket, the government forces the emptying of California’s bucket through tax and spend transfers.  Perhaps that is why Churchill famously said “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

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