“Berkeley Got Its Liberalism”
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
George Will, the deeply intellectual fiscal Conservative, has a great article out today (read it at georgewill@washpost.com). He dissects the maladies the state of California is facing. “California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit.”
A New Yorker article by Tad Friend is used to expound the impact of Liberalism on the University of California budget system. The state fiscal mess caused a 20% cut in the UCAL system budget last year; and in-state student fees were raised 32% (to $10,302, which remains 70%below Stanford and other private universities in California). ”Only 1/6 of normal turnover new faculty have been hired over the last year at UCal Berkeley due to budget cuts.” The Cal State system, ” a cut below the UC campuses”, will enroll 40,000 fewer students this year for the same reason.
Over the last four decades, Liberals’ “redistributive itch” used an income tax that sent wealth-creators fleeing from the ‘formerly’ Golden State. ”During business cycle booms, tax revenues pour in stimulating government spending; during contractions, revenues dwindle but new government spending continues to expand.” William Voegeli, in the Claremont Review of Books , writes “Between 1990 and 2007, 3.4 million more Americans left California than moved into the state…. the state lost 26% of its factory jobs and 35% of its high-tech manufacturing positions.” “Compassionate liberalism” drew an import of Mexico’s poverty-stricken citizens; It turned the state into what Voegeli calls a “unionocracy”, run by and for unionized public employees. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees boasts some of the “nation’s most highly compensated” government employees; and why, according to Will, “California’s economy is being suffocated by the weight of government” with “little leftover for” the public universities like Cal Berkeley.
The irony of the budget situation and future fiscal health of the state is that the overwhelming number of pronounced liberal professors in the UCal system will have to live with the ideological consequences they ingrain in their students. Read for yourself Friend’s accounts of recent radical activities during meetings of 5,000 Berkeley employees and students at rallies last September over the budget shortages. They would be comical if they weren’t so scary. Kevin Starr, author of a history of California, warns that California is “on the verge” of becoming “a failed state” as it follows a similar path of radical liberal ideology as New York the only state with a greater “number of outward-bound moving vans”.
