Texas is the future?

The conservative London Economist is suggesting that Texas is the wave of the future: America's future: California v Texas 07/09/09.

It does provide a handy definition of the problem that has forced California's staet government for years to chronically operate on the verge of bankruptcy:

No state has quite so many overlapping systems of accountability or such a gerrymandered legislature. Ballot initiatives, the crack cocaine of democracy, have left only around a quarter of its budget within the power of its representative politicians. (One reason budget cuts are inevitable is that voters rejected tax increases in a package of ballot measures in May.)

But in thinking that Texas style government is the wave of the future, I guess The Economist's editors just snoozed through the Cheney-Bush administration, when we got to see Texas-style government implemented on a national and international scale. That would be the experiment that wrecked the world's financial system, slammed the world economy into the Great Recession, put the United States into the torture business, and produced corruption on a scale that makes Teapot Dome sound like an immaterial accounting error.

Oh, and produced the worst strategic disaster in the history of American foreign policy with the Iraq War.

No, thanks, eight years of that kind of "Texas" government was more than enough for a century or two!

Tags: bush administration, california politics, predator+state, texas

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