The compact cuts both ways

The Washington Examiner reports that California has become among the most expensive places in the nation to live, burdened by steep income taxes, housing costs that put ownership beyond ordinary reach, and energy prices that press hardest on those who can least afford them. People and businesses, the lead tells us, have been leaving as a consequence. I cannot speak to the precise figures — that would be inference on my part — but the civic shape of the problem is as old as the republic itself.

Government is instituted for the benefit of the governed. That is not a sentiment; it is the foundational premise from which all legitimate authority flows. When the cost of that government — measured not only in direct taxation but in every regulatory surcharge and fee that raises the price of shelter, warmth, and work — grows so heavy that citizens vote with their feet rather than with their ballots, something essential has gone wrong. The social compact has been violated, and it has been violated from above.

I confess a particular concern about taxation that falls heaviest on the smallholder: the family that rents because it cannot buy, the tradesperson whose energy bill eats the margin between solvency and ruin. My deepest conviction was always that an independent citizenry — men and women who own what they work and work what they own — is the living foundation of a republic. Tax policy that systematically destroys that independence does not merely inconvenience; it corrupts the very character of self-governance.

There is, I should note, a fair counter-argument. States retain the sovereign right — indeed the responsibility — to tax and to govern as their citizens direct. I was never an enemy of state authority; I was its defender against federal overreach. If the people of California freely choose this burden through their elected representatives, that is federalism at work, however imprudent the result. The remedy, in the first instance, is the ballot, not a lecture from Washington.

And yet, when the cost of staying rises past what ordinary citizens can sustain, the ballot becomes theoretical. A citizen who has had to leave cannot easily vote in the place that taxed him out. This is why fiscal restraint is not merely an economic virtue but a civic one: it keeps the governed in a position to govern. I set down, long ago, my belief that the earth belongs to the living — that no generation should bind the next with debts and burdens it did not choose. A tax structure that makes residency itself unaffordable binds the next generation just as surely as any unpaid bond. The principle is the same; only the mechanism differs. Let those who hold power in Sacramento weigh that carefully — not because a distant federal hand should compel them, but because their own citizens, if they remain free and informed, eventually will.