At The Washington Examiner, Michael Barone laments the loss of the California dream, a phenomenon he has followed and written about for decades. He begins:

Many years ago, sometime after Ronald Reagan replaced Pat Brown as governor of California, I was driving up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco and visited San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s epic mansion. It was state property then, donated by the Hearst family, and the uniformed guide struck me as knowledgeable, competent, and proud of her work.

Some time later, I wrote articles arguing that California, not yet the highest-tax state but never a tax haven either, was proof that big government could provide competent services. For a generation under Govs. Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan, California state government built thousands of miles of freeway, first-rate state universities, and a whole archipelago of community colleges and had begun to reduce smog in the Los Angeles basin.

Read more here.