The California Doom Loop Grows

by Andy Caldwell

I have written previously about California’s war on energy that is destroying our economy. Yet, the war on energy is but one facet of the assault on our liberties and freedoms.

I sat in on a meeting decades ago with members of the Santa Barbara County Cattlemen’s Association as they listened to a warden of the California Fish and Game department explain to them the diktat that “you may own the land, but we own the resources.”

What did she mean by that?

Unfortunately, what she meant is no mystery, especially, these many years later. The state lays claim to air, land (including trees, brush, and wildlife), and the use of water (both surface and below-ground), on so-called private property.

For instance, if a rancher wants to clear his land to plant something, he could run afoul of the law protecting trees, brush, wildlife, and animal migration paths referred to as “wildlife corridors,” not to mention the need to get a permit to “grade,” that is to adjust the scope and lay of the land.

If he wants to water the crop, he will soon have to give the state the authority to monitor his water well to make sure he is not using more water than the government says he is entitled to via the State Ground Water Management Act.

If he needs to burn the brush he cleared off the land, he will have to get a permit from the Air Pollution Control District. If he allows his cows to access a creek for water or to move from one pasture to another, he will have to reckon with the Water Quality Control Board because the cows could contaminate the creek water. If a mountain lion is killing calves, he would have to obtain a depredation permit from the State Fish and Game Department to protect his livestock.

All this reminds me of the quote “When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you… you may know that your society is doomed.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.

Impossible Standards and Demands

When the Brits were coming, we had to look for them by land or sea. The assault on our freedoms these days is by way of air, land, and sea. For the air, we have the California Air Resources Board which has set up draconian and far-reaching regs affecting air quality in the state, including flatulence from cows. For the coast lands, we have the California Coastal Commission which is the most unaccountable regulatory body in the country. They are experts at regulating things of minutia such as maintaining stairs to the beach. They have also killed projects of ultimate importance to meet pressing needs such as drought-busting desalination plants. Then there are the infamous state and local Water Quality Control Boards trying to force farmers and ranchers to somehow maintain water quality standards so strict that the pure driven snow in the Sierras can’t meet the standards.

Farmers and pest management companies also must contend with the State Department of Pesticide regulations which keeps taking away the tools needed to protect our food and homes from dangerous and deadly pests. The oil industry now suffers from the fiats from CalGem that are regulating the oil industry to death by arbitrary and capricious standards that involve prohibitions against drilling.

Re-Examining the Original “No Kings” Movement

In addition to all that, we have Prop 65 which regulates the storage, use, and disposal of most all chemicals in our state because of their potential to be hazardous. Then there is the American Disability Act, which in California has been used to bludgeon the business community by way of serial litigants allowed to sue businesses time and time again for minor infractions. Prop. 65 and the ADA, plus several other laws, including PAGA lawsuits, which allow private attorneys to sue private companies for violating various laws, means that California is always listed as the number one or two judicial hellhole in America, year after year, because our businesses get sued and prosecuted more than in any other state.

Time and space fails me to mention the black hole of environmental review, which also leads to the paralysis of analysis and unlimited lawsuits, aka, the California Environmental Quality Act, also known as CEQA. Then there is the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, which in California are used as excuses to control the use of land and water in a most draconian fashion.

Our complaint against King George this July 4^th holiday week comes to mind, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.... He has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

That, my friends, was the original “No Kings” movement.

Perhaps it’s time to revive it.

Andy Caldwell, Executive Director, COLAB

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