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Jan. 15, 2021 - Epoch Times
42:34
California’s Election Results, Explained; What it means for Californians | William Swaim
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We want to talk to you about the election.
We just had the election in California and the propositions.
We want to hear what happened.
The outcome suggests that Californians trust government less than they trust the marketplace.
And it's going to impact, when we're covering it, it's going to impact the small businesses because a lot of these small businesses, their rent The taxes get passed to them.
You've got it exactly right.
The landowner doesn't just say, well, gosh, I have to pay more in taxes.
I guess that means I make a lower profit.
No.
He or she turns around and says to the muffler shop owner, the florist, the dentist, the eyeglass guy, the veterinary supply company, they say to them, you owe me 15% now, more this year.
And so they don't just say, well, I guess I'm going to lose profit now.
No, they raise their prices.
What else was noticeable?
If a government union is behind any of these initiatives, the ultimate goal is not what's in the public interest, it's what's in that union's interest.
They are very well-financed, government unions are in California.
A billion dollars a year they raise, just about.
A billion dollars a year.
They are easily the most powerful forces in California's political system.
On November 3rd, Californians voted on the future of the state through 12 propositions.
These propositions included privacy rights, rent control, taxes, and affirmative action.
Back with us today is veteran journalist Will Swain.
He's the president of California's Policy Center and was the publisher of OC Weekly.
Today he discusses how Californians voted on each proposition and what that means for the future of the state.
Welcome to California Insider.
Will, it's great to have you back on.
Thanks for inviting me again.
We want to talk to you about the election.
We just had the election in California and the propositions.
These propositions usually have really strange names.
Sometimes they have strange descriptions.
You don't know what you're voting for.
You don't know what yes means.
You don't know what no means.
They're all twisted.
We want to hear what happened.
Sure.
Well, I think the bottom line, and this is my perspective, that if you really look at ballot propositions as either a vote for more government or for less government and more private enterprise, I think the outcome of this most recent election and the ballot propositions themselves, and I'm talking about the candidates, I'm talking about just those ballot measures, the outcome suggests that Californians trust government less than they trust the marketplace.
So I went through the ballot propositions with my team and we took a look at whether a ballot initiative, if approved, would either grow government or grow the private sector.
And we rated each proposition accordingly.
And now we're just looking at the outcomes in terms of the actual votes.
And I would say the outcomes suggest that Californians generally trust government less than they do the marketplace.
And what was the outcome?
Yeah, well, the first proposition is Proposition 14, and that was a bond initiative.
And what a bond is is basically it allows the government to go out and borrow money at interest, right, and then to spend that money on a government project.
In this case, the government project was stem cell research.
So what the government was proposing was we're going to borrow 5.5 billion dollars At a cost to us an additional three and a half or four billion dollars in interest payments, and we're going to use that five and a half billion dollars to fund stem cell research.
And for those of us, you know, who aren't medical wizards, stem cell research does appear to be a really productive and effective way to really improve human health.
And I think in the middle of the COVID epidemic is especially sort of provocative, right?
People are looking at, you know, the possibility that thousands of people around them are dying from this dread disease.
Any kind of effort to improve health, I think, is going to be met gladly.
And the outcome on this one, however, means that government debt is increased.
And government, when it increases its debt, has to either cut spending someplace else in order to pay for that debt, or it has to raise taxes.
Which has its own kind of pernicious impact on the private sector and the quality of our lives.
So it's like using your credit card.
It feels good today when you use it, but you are going to have to pay that off at some point.
So California has voted pretty powerfully to go for this bond, that is to go farther into debt.
Now we're a state that's already deeply troubled in terms of our borrowing.
We have unfunded debt on retirement for government employees that is about 30 percent of what we need.
We're in deep, I'm sorry, about 70% of what we need or about 30% behind.
We're already in debt.
That's why you keep seeing the pressure for taxes and other local bonds going up all the time.
This one passed.
And as I say, I think, you know, it's sort of easy to understand that somebody just walking into the ballot box on election day or sitting at home at the kitchen table and filling out their vote by mail ballot.
Looked at this and said, a lot of disease.
I hate cancer.
I say yes to stem cell research.
It's a feel-good bond initiative, but it does increase government debt.
It does increase the size of government.
So score one for the government side, right?
On the contrary, Proposition 15, which is called the Split Roll Tax, do you remember this one?
Yes, yes.
We actually covered it.
Yeah.
You know, where you would tax the, they were going to tax the commercial properties and then use that for schools and cities.
That's right.
So, Prop 15 went out there.
This is pushed primarily by the Teachers Union and by Service Employees International Union, by a bunch of the government unions because they want more money going into the government to pay for all their, their pay and benefit increases.
And it lost.
It was sort of a shock because at a time when a lot of Californians were looking around themselves and seeing homelessness and rampant drug use on the streets of L.A. and San Francisco, you know, and our schools closed and collapsing and the teachers union saying we just need more money, make the rich pay, it died.
It died at the ballot box.
So this suggests, I think, a reasonableness, a moderateness, an understanding of how business actually works, how the economy actually works, that I don't think the teachers union banked on.
Having said that, so Prop 15 lost.
That's one for the more private enterprise side of the ledger.
Though it lost, I think it's important to notice to know that this is not the first time and it is not the last time the unions will be back at the ballot box.
Guarantee it.
They'll be back in two to four years.
Because there's a big shortage of funding, right?
That's right.
Yes, because local governments are falling short of the promises they've made to their government workers.
And government unions in California raise about a billion dollars a year in union dues and they spend that electing candidates who once in public office approve every pay and benefits package the union wants from them, right?
So the union gets you into office and they come and they ask you for this new pay package and you say yes or they'll take you out.
We see this all over the state.
So politicians are constantly pressed to raise taxes, sell bonds, you know, gather more debt in order to pay off these short-term expenses.
So, Prop 15 didn't pass, overwhelmingly beat back, but look for something like it to appear in a different kind of language, talking about fairness and social justice again in two years.
But just know that this goes to a very limited group of union leaders who are really pushing behind the scenes for higher taxes, and higher taxes always are a drag on the economy.
And it's going to impact, when we're covering it, it's going to impact the small businesses because a lot of these small businesses, the rent, the taxes get passed to them.
That's exactly right.
Yes, you've got it exactly right.
The landowner doesn't just say, well, gosh, I have to pay more in taxes.
I guess that means I make a lower profit.
No.
He or she turns around and says to the muffler shop owner, the florist, the dentist, the eyeglass guy, the veterinary supply company, they say to them, you owe me 15% now, more this year.
And so they don't just say, well, I guess I'm going to lose profit now.
No, they raise their prices.
And that, of course, might push people to go online more because the taxes might be less.
But it certainly damages, it raises the cost of living and damages community in that area.
What else was noticeable during this election?
Well, we can just go down the list.
Affirmative action on Prop 16 was just absolutely fascinating because in an era when we all saw George Floyd get killed in Minneapolis, the cry for social justice seemed to be too powerful to not sweep along this cruel Crazy, racist policy.
The government should decide how many people get government contracts or get to go to school based only on their race or ethnicity, not on their aptitude, not on their skill in testing, just on the basis of, say, their skin color or their gender.
And what's remarkable about this to me is that Californians turned out, they shut down affirmative action back in the late 90s, 1996, mid-90s.
And they killed affirmative action in California.
And when they ended it, you would have expected if the people who supported this Prop 16 initiative, if they were right, and affirmative action ended in 1996, we should have seen just the wholesale destruction of black people in universities, of Latino kids in school, of contracting to minority-owned businesses.
In fact, we saw something quite different.
Just to look at university admissions, what we saw after affirmative action was ended in 1996 up through today, what we saw was that black people lost no ground at all.
So none of the gains that they had made through 1996 were lost at all.
Asian Americans benefited most in the Post Affirmative Action Society because they were no longer capped.
Asian Americans, for a whole bunch of perhaps cultural reasons, tend to outperform virtually everybody else in terms of university admissions.
And accordingly, their share of university admissions grew dramatically.
You know who else grew?
Latinos.
Latino students applying to the University of California or Cal State University system actually accelerated dramatically beyond their 1996 levels.
So if all those people either stayed the same, African Americans, or actually increased their share of admissions, Latinos and Asian Americans, who lost out?
White people!
Didn't get as many seats.
So the white people, who are really the targets of Proposition 16's reaffirmation of affirmative action, were actually the group who lost most.
And I'm not saying that's terrible and white people have been ripped off.
What I'm saying is the market decided, for the most part, that Asian-Americans were going to benefit most, then Latinos, then blacks, then whites.
So there are still other cultural forces at work, of course.
But the short of it is that Californians turned away again this siren song of letting the government determine who gets to go to school, who gets to benefit from the university system, who gets the benefit of a government contractor.
It turned away this ethnic and racist, race-based system.
And I do think it's racist.
There was a time, I mean, we all remember the great Martin Luther King Jr.
who said, you know, judge not a man by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character.
Affirmative action requires us only to pay attention to race.
Suddenly, we go from being a colorblind society to a society in which all we can see is race and ethnicity and gender.
Instead of saying, like, what's the quality of this individual in the workplace and the school, we're now just judging it by this very superficial metric, a metric, I would argue, that Southern racists loved for centuries.
This is how the entire South was run until the Civil War, and even for the hundred years after.
It was run on a race-based caste system, and affirmative action is just the flip side of that same coin.
Was it a wide margin?
Yes.
I think by now it is – I'm so sorry to go back to my notes here – but when I last looked, it was about 56 percent voted no.
That's a pretty overwhelming margin.
So, may I go on?
Yeah, go ahead.
So we had two ballot initiatives that refer to what we call in political science suffrage, and that just means who gets to vote.
The first one was Proposition 17, and that restored the right to vote to people who had served their prison time for felonies, but who might still have some sort of probationary responsibilities, some sort of limits on their behavior.
And this one passed, right?
This one passed.
People voted overwhelmingly for it.
Now, they did not vote for the next one.
That is Proposition 18, also considered a suffrage.
That is a right-to-vote issue.
This was the one that I think laughably suggested that 17-year-olds who will be 18 in the next general election ought to be able to vote now as 17-year-olds.
I don't know about you, but when I was 17, I would have made terrible voting decisions, although not as bad as I made when I was 27 and had gone through my communist experience, which you know too much about.
But I think the idea that somehow 17-year-olds are competent to vote really does not understand childhood development.
So Californians overwhelmingly voted against that one.
The next one was Proposition...
19.
And this one was a very complicated one.
This one had to do with residential property taxes.
So we talked about Proposition 15, which was about commercial and industrial, right?
Proposition 19 dealt with residential, but it dealt with it in a way that was very sneaky.
And I say that because, on the one hand, it seemed to be offering you the portability.
That is, the ability to take the Proposition 13 property protection, property tax protections you had on your home.
It allowed you to take that from one county to another.
They call that portability or mobility.
So I live in Orange County.
You live in Orange County.
We have a property tax assessment here that is protected by Prop 13.
But if we move to most other California counties, they won't recognize that Prop 13 protection in their county.
It's not portable.
We start all over again.
The clock starts, right?
So Prop 19 said, no, you get to take it with you no matter where you go.
So if you've lived 20 years in Orange County and you moved to San Luis Obispo County, you get to take your 20 years of protections with you.
But that's how they sold it, on portability.
But the reality is that it was also a push to make sure that those protections were not entirely protected and that what the state could do is come in and, through a back door, raise property taxes on all others buying residential property.
Sort of finding a back door into Prop 13.
And who was pushing for this?
Who do you think?
Government unions.
They loved it.
Who else liked it?
The realtors.
It was really interesting to find that real estate folks, you know, people who buy and sell homes...
Because it would create more transactions?
Generates huge numbers of new transactions, right?
Because if I can now move easily throughout the state, I'd benefit from that portability.
But the government unions really wanted it because they want to see the transactions develop, too.
They want to see housing open up in a certain way, and they really want to find the back door into Prop 13.
So that was Prop 19.
And it didn't pass, right?
It did pass, actually.
Prop 19 passed.
So what it means is it's great that we all get portability, but we should have had that anyway.
But it's going to undermine Prop 13 protections in some significant other ways.
Prop 20 was backed by law enforcement.
And again, the way that it was described in your sample ballot was it makes changes to policies related to criminal sentencing charges, prison release, and DNA collection.
Conservative people and libertarians, and I don't mean that politically, but people who really value personal freedom should have been immediately opposed to this.
The DNA collection was especially onerous, I think.
It means that if you're pulled over just as a suspect in a crime Just a suspect.
The law enforcement is allowed and required, in fact, to collect your DNA. The assumption being, if we stopped you for a traffic crime, you may be guilty of some other crime in the future, and we're going to want this data.
So you're talking about creating the largest government DNA collection.
In America, we got 40 million people.
The goal would be every time you have a stop by law enforcement, eventually they're allowed to collect DNA from you and then keep it on file.
There's a real kind of personal property.
I mean, what's more personal than the property of our bodies?
And here the government is saying, nope, we have a right to collect your DNA from you.
There were sentencing changes in there and prison release things.
This was backed in large part by the prison guards.
It was a disaster, I think.
If you watched how the prison guards behaved in the last election, for those people in Orange County, we watched the prison guards come and play very hard.
They dropped a million dollars into one state Senate race here, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Irvine area.
They were just all over.
And what's the goal of the prison guards?
Make sure the prison guards get more money.
And how do they get more money?
And how do they get more members?
By having larger prisons.
So, look, the work the prison guards do is really hard.
Is that backed by state, or is that state employees, or are these private prisons?
No, these are government-run prisons.
In fact, if you try to start a private prison...
So do they have an incentive to have more people in the prisons?
Yes.
But on the other end, they were trying to actually cap this $900 when you can steal up to $900 and get away with it multiple times.
They were going to stop that as well, right?
Well, that's right.
And I think that's a good thing, right?
Like the idea that somehow, I think what you're referring to is new state law that says that basically until you steal $900 in a single act of theft, you can't be arrested really.
It's a misdemeanor.
Yeah, it's a misdemeanor and you can do it repeatedly.
You can do it repeatedly.
Yeah.
So what this encourages is serial theft, serial robberies.
And, you know, this has got to be disheartening in the extreme to have people who are, you know, making transactions, clerking transactions of $30 or $40 to watch somebody walk out with basically shopping bags, recyclable shopping bags filled with stuff that doesn't hit that $900 maximum.
I've talked to store owners and cops who say, there are people who walk in with a calculator.
They do figure.
Yes.
Exactly.
If it's 900, put it back.
Put one thing back.
So, yeah, part of this is about reforming that.
And again, there's good stuff in with bad stuff.
But the bottom line of this was a real overreach by the prison guards union and by others.
They were selling us something that is good, that is, reforming this kind of crazy statute, but also...
Having other things that would restrict...
Personal freedom, yes.
And that one didn't pass.
That did not pass.
Yeah, so that was a loss.
One of the worst propositions on here was Proposition 21, and that would have given local governments the right to...
To rent control again, to deploy rent control in their communities.
Now this was pitched as, gosh, local governments ought to be allowed to do whatever they want.
But in fact, it's yet one more way for the government to start to control property that they don't own.
So if you're a person who owns a house or you rent a room or whatever, This rent control bill, I'm sorry, this rent control ballot initiative would have really limited your ability to actually make ends meet.
We've seen what happens in San Francisco and Santa Monica where rent control runs everything.
And is the homeless crisis better or worse in this place?
Do the price go up when there is it?
So I've heard the mixed results.
Some people told me that when there is rent control, it will cause the rent prices to go up significantly.
Even though it looks like on the surface, when you have rent control, you control the rent.
Well, that's a really interesting phenomenon.
So yes, when you have rent control, what happens is, as soon as I, if I'm a landowner and you're a tenant, as soon as I get you out of there, and I know that rent control is going to kick in, I'm going to raise my rent as much as I think I might need for the next, not just year or two years or three years, but as long as I think you're going to be in my apartment that I'm renting to you.
So I have to guess how much are my costs as a landowner, as a rental organization, going to go up?
How are my costs going to go up?
And I have to predict what that might be.
And it's better to be safe than sorry and overestimate how much I think my costs are going to be Then to be on the other end and underestimate the increase in that cost to me and be stuck with a tenant whose rental payments to me don't meet what I need to keep up that place.
Another phenomenon, if I own rental property and I'm in a rent control environment, what's my incentive to really keep that space up to speed if I know that you're just going to stay in there longer and I'm not going to be able to capture the market value?
So we then do the fixed shares?
Right.
I mean there's all kinds of, then you need other laws to come in and say you really do have to maintain this place, right?
So now we need laws to correct the problems associated with the first law.
So rent control sounds great until you're in an apartment and your landowner is trying to figure out ways to get you out.
It incentivizes bad behavior.
I'm not saying this happens all the time.
I'm saying, but it incentivizes bad behavior in the landlord.
Raise your rents now because you don't know when you're going to be able to.
And invest as little as you can into the property because you don't know how much it's going to cost you tomorrow to keep this tenant in there.
So the other thing that happens, of course, is that investors who might be building rental property that would increase the supply of housing and therefore lower the cost of housing to people who live in a community, those investors look elsewhere.
John Cox, who ran for governor on the Republican side in 2018 against Gavin Newsom, They were in a debate.
Gavin Newsom said, aha, I've got you.
You're a real estate developer, but you don't build rental.
You don't build apartments in California.
You build most of your apartments outside the state.
You're a bad man.
And John Cox said, you've made it too expensive for me to make money.
I can't make money in California.
I can make money in other states.
So our developers don't build property here in California unless there's a government subsidy to do so.
That's another cost to all the rest of us, right?
The government takes money from you and from everybody else here watching.
They take that money and they give it to a developer.
So the developer can make up the difference between the profitability of building here and building in, say, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, or elsewhere.
And that one, that lost.
Rent control lost very badly.
Prop 22, most of our viewers here could not help but see the commercials for Prop 22.
You remember this one, right?
Yeah.
It's everywhere.
This is the one on the Uber drivers.
You know, there was a law, AB5, that passed that made it illegal to have contractors.
It made it much more difficult for companies to hire contractors.
Right.
And it was targeting Uber and Lyft and a lot of these companies.
So apparently they brought it on the ballot.
That's right.
Here's what's fascinating about this.
You were the guys who worked for years and years and years to refine Uber or Lyft or DoorDash.
And then you brought it to the public and you said to people, hey, if you'd like to work a few hours for us driving your car and picking up other people or picking up their food and delivering it, we've got a job for you.
Are you interested?
Well, you can work for us for a couple of hours, however long you want.
It could be as little as one trip per day or several.
You could make this your full-time job or something you do on the side.
But this is our offer.
And thousands, tens of thousands of people said, I'm in.
This is great for me.
I like the flexibility.
I like the income.
I like to meet people.
I like to get out.
Whatever their reasons were, they liked it.
I like driving.
I like driving.
Yeah.
And so, overwhelmingly, people came in.
Now, two groups eyeballed this phenomenon of Uber and Lyft and DoorDash and said...
We hate it.
Who are those groups?
Government unions and other unions who said, this is a whole new, this is a threat to the union run economy.
Unions which have been designed now for hundreds of years to protect incumbent employees and industry, we call them incumbents, people who are already situated and already have it made.
That's what unions are for, to protect those people against any kind of competition.
To protect the way their job is today, to make it never change again in a way that they may not like.
That's what a union is for.
They looked at this and they said, this transforms the economic landscape.
If people are allowed to make a choice, we're in trouble.
The other party that was looking at this skeptically and with some terror was the government and the government unions who said, there's a whole lot of payroll taxes we might be missing.
We need these people to be paying into this system.
If they're independent contractors, maybe they don't.
And it hit, of course, at Uber, Lyft and DoorDash and other kinds of gig economy sorts of enterprises.
But it also hit people like graphic designers, hairstylists, entertainers.
Artists.
Artists.
All sorts of people.
We interviewed a lot of them online.
Okay, so you know this better than most people and probably even better than I, but those people too got swept up in the net of Assembly Bill 5.
Sadly to me, Uber and Lyft and DoorDash first had to spend $200 million to secure what I think is a constitutional right, and that is a right to their property.
I don't think the government has a right to tell them that what they're doing isn't fair to the employee if the employees aren't complaining.
And if the employees don't like it, they're allowed to go someplace else.
There's no government requirement to work for Uber, DoorDash, or Lyft.
And there's no question about the safety.
Uber and Lyft weren't doing something that was unsafe.
But Uber and Lyft had to spend $200 million.
That's a lot of money.
That's like government union money.
I mean, when the government unions jump into a campaign, they can drop tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they have.
We already talked about Prop 15, where they dumped at least 60 million that we know of by Election Day.
So, Uber and Lyft spent a load of money protecting their rights, and one can only wish that Uber and Lyft had also said, you know what, this is not just about our business, this is about Assembly Bill 5.
The bill is wrong.
On its face, it's unconstitutional, and we're taking a stand because we've got money.
It would have been nice to see them do that thing.
In fairness to them, that's not their job.
So they didn't include the other professions.
It did not.
So there's a special carve-out now for anybody who's got power.
Uber, Lyft, DoorDash.
The other group that interestingly got out of, that was exempted from Assembly Bill 5, newspapers.
Why were newspapers exempted from this?
Do you know about this one?
Because you work in the business.
Yeah.
They were allowed to exempt themselves because they have freelance news writers.
They have freelance carriers.
You know, the man or woman who throws the paper on the doorway.
But why would the California state legislature agree to let newspapers out of this deal?
Why would they exempt them from Assembly Bill 5?
Because there are lots of other people complaining.
But why newspapers?
Because newspapers control public opinion.
And if you tick off the newspaper editor, the newspaper publisher, he or she might come gunning for you.
So a lot of the newspaper publishers are totally satisfied.
Well, we're out, so we don't have to worry about Assembly Bill 5 anymore.
We'll let other people worry about that.
So Uber and Lyft came in and they got their exemption.
So the only people who are left now as victims of this terrible, I would argue, unconstitutional right to work where you want, in the way that you want, who are those people?
They're people who aren't represented by a union.
People who aren't represented...
They don't have lobbyists.
They don't have lobbyists.
People, that's a good way to put it, people without lobbyists.
So, so Proposition 22 passes overwhelmingly.
So again, that's a vote, at least as I see it and probably you, for the free market versus government control.
Proposition 23 was pushed again by the unions.
This was, if you read it on your sample ballot, it would have required, it said, a physician on-site at dialysis clinics and consent from the state for a clinic to close.
Now, if you read the details, what this was really about was putting the government in charge of these dialysis centers.
I won't go into the medical description of what a dialysis center is, but let's just say in California, you can go to strip malls where they have dialysis centers.
You can go do your shopping, then go do your dialysis treatment.
It's amazing.
They're all over the place.
And the reason they're all over the place is because they have figured out how to bring the cost of the technology down for this really essential medical service and make it broadly available.
So the Service Employees International Union that backed this proposition said, oh, this is terrible, the way they're running these things, and it's a danger to you.
We can't have it run this way.
More government control is necessary.
And oh, by the way, Our union members will benefit from some of the fine print provisions.
So Californians looking at this kind of government control or market accessibility voted for the market overwhelmingly.
And it's a great win for all Californians, particularly but not only those who really rely on these dialysis clinics.
One of my least favorite propositions on the ballot passed, and I think that's Proposition 24.
And if you read it, it sounds like a really kind of obvious and reasonable thing.
It expanded the provisions of California's Consumer Privacy Act.
And it created the California Privacy Protection Agency to implement and enforce that act.
So what is this about?
It's about the right of, say, Google or Facebook to capture your data when you use their free service and to use that data to sell you products and services or to sell it to other people so they can sell you products and services.
Now, notice that that exchange of my data It allows me to use this amazing machinery of Google or Facebook or whatever for free.
That's my payment.
They could charge me a dollar every time I get on, but they don't.
They just ask me to use my data.
And then there are limits that I sign off on about how they can use my data.
This proposition lost me as soon as I started reading into it, and it said, it creates a new agency.
Just what Californians need.
So it would be another agency that will oversee this?
Correct.
So imagine an agency now that is allowed to field claims from anybody that says, hey, Google misused my information.
Facebook misused my information.
And this government agency is going to grow and grow and grow because, of course, these technologies are growing and growing and growing.
And so the government wants to be a kind of an offset to that growth and limit the voluntary interaction I have every day with, I'm not big on Facebook, but with Google.
I use Google countless times every day.
Now the California government wants to insert itself into that.
And it's so extraordinary that when I was traveling in Europe about a year ago, That when I would open up my computer to do work, and I would do a Google search on stuff back here, the websites would pop up and say, the European community is required to allow you to let you know that California limits your ability to use this unless you accept cookies.
Now, we're all used to this now, right?
But this is what the government has done.
It has created this whole new bureaucracy, and worse, It has created an incentive for private trial attorneys to sue these companies.
So if I'm an attorney and I can find one person to complain against Google, then I can get a class action suit of 10 or 20 or 100 people, go to court and say, Google owes my clients $100 million for violating their privacy because it took their data and used it in a way they didn't like.
But I think Google will have a lot of attorneys and they would get away with it, but it will affect the small businesses, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah, you're right to say that Google might be able to afford this, but that doesn't make it right.
But you're right that the worst impact would be on smaller users.
So people on Etsy, for example, where you're just selling your own little products and services, you're going to pay for this.
If I don't like the way Etsy is using its technology, then I sue Etsy.
Well, in California law, any attorney can now bring my case against Etsy, sue them.
What's Etsy going to do?
Shut down, raise its cost to me, limit my interaction, voluntary interaction with consumers who like my products.
Again, it's the government inserting itself in what ought to be a voluntary relationship.
I don't have any problem with Google using the information I used.
I'm now followed around by Warby Parker glasses because they made my glasses and I ordered them online, right?
And followed around by Johnston and Murphy because I bought my shoes online.
That's the worst thing that's happened to me online is that I now see more ads for products I like.
I understand that there are dangers to the global uses of my personal data, which is why I'm never on TikTok.
I'm sure you're familiar with TikTok.
Don't like the fact that there's not just a backdoor, but that ultimately the government of China owns the data on TikTok.
So I tell people whenever I get a chance, be careful with TikTok.
They're not your friend.
They may seem sweet and light and like your next-door neighbor.
They're not.
They're run by the Chinese government, and that means they're owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
And they have some algorithms.
They have a methodology to make it very addictive.
Yes.
Oh, absolutely.
So people become addicted to that.
Well, this is the whole goal of all these social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, you name it.
The whole goal is to engage us at a pretty primal level.
So, you know, I look at Twitter and I notice that in my own brain there's a kind of an endorphin fix going on there.
Did somebody like what I wrote?
Did somebody hate something I wrote?
And they run on our rage.
They really are just absolutely like sci-fi kinds of possibilities.
But this particular proposition won.
And I think this is going to be bad for California's economy.
I think it's going to be bad for California.
I don't just think.
I know.
I am predicting.
I will bet.
So those small businesses are going to get impacted, the ones that...
Every one of us will be impacted.
Again, just because Google can afford to defend itself doesn't mean that they're going to just eat that cost.
They will pass it on in some other way.
There will be cost to other businesses who want to advertise on Google.
They'll bear the cost.
And ultimately, when I buy products from that business, I'll bear the cost.
So nothing is free.
Right?
When I get on Facebook or Twitter or Google, I'm giving them access to my data in exchange for their service.
But when the government intrudes itself and it creates an agency like this one, like this Consumer Privacy Protection Bureau, this is going to be bad.
This will have an effect on all our lives.
And as I predicted in a Twitter, I said, this is great.
If the California state government runs this as well as they manage our forests and our homeless crisis, we're all going to be celebrities.
Forget your privacy.
It's over.
So, Will, you were talking about Google, but I don't think Google is going to, this is going to affect some small businesses.
I think companies like Google, Facebook, they're collecting so much information on us.
And when it comes to these type of laws, what they do is they're going to have a department, they're going to pass, they're going to do all the check marks, and they're going to get away with it.
But it's going to be that small business that has 20 employees, that doesn't have...
An IT team doesn't know what they're doing.
They're selling products.
Those are the ones that are going to get hurt, right?
That's right.
Yeah, you know, I think you and I may have spoken about this before.
There's a wonderful book published, I think, in 1963 by an author, Gabriel Kolko, K-O-L-K-O, called The Triumph of Conservatism.
And his argument is that Really powerful corporations use the law in a way to bar new competitors.
And it sounds like you're describing a situation sort of like that, that Google and Facebook will probably be okay with this law.
I was using it as an example, but I take your point.
And it's that, if I understand you correctly, it sounds like what you're saying is really interesting and along these lines that Google can afford this new regulation.
There's a famous line in that book.
I think it's Andrew Carnegie, who says, I like competition, but I like cooperation better.
And he was talking about cooperating among his peers to make sure that competitors didn't enter the business.
And by using the regulatory state to do that.
Yeah, and they would know a lot about it.
It's technology.
They're going to be manipulating all of this.
And that small business that has 20, 30, 50 employees, that doesn't have a strong IT department, That's the one that has to pay the price.
Yes.
That's a great insight, I think.
Do you mind if we just talk about the last one here?
Sure.
Proposition 25, you cool with this?
This is one about cash bail.
Do you remember much about that one?
Yeah, yeah.
I thought this one was the one that actually, they were going to computerize it, right?
And they were going to get rid of the cash bail.
That's correct.
The argument is that this is the point at which an American's liberties have been stripped from them pretty violently.
Because at this point, you're just a suspect, right?
You're not guilty of a crime yet.
Judge has not said you're guilty.
You're just a suspect.
So as a conservative myself, a person who really appreciates personal liberty and the Constitution of the United States, I acknowledge that the point at which an American is apprehended and put in jail is a problem.
And your ability to get out depends upon the speed with which a judge can hear your case, but also...
Whether you're able to afford bail to get out.
Now the way we've tried to balance that here in California and in most places in the U.S. is we've allowed judges to consider a number of things about your case.
So you're brought before a judge and one of the things the judge is thinking about is the seriousness of your crime.
If I let you back out, even on bail, are you likely to commit this crime again?
What are your economic circumstances?
What's your ability to raise bail if I decide that maybe you can be let out?
And how much bail is going to incentivize you to return so that you don't just break out of here, go on a crime spree, and run away because your bail amount was too low?
So you want the bail to be set high enough that you have an incentive to show up again for your trial.
Because if you don't show up, you owe the whole amount.
I'm not sure if that's entirely clear.
So a person goes into jail.
They can post bail.
The judge determines whether you can afford it, what you can afford, and whether you're a danger to the community.
Under this proposition, Prop 25, there would have been no more cash bail.
It would only be an algorithm that determines your flight risk, that is, the fact that you may just get out the door and then run and never show up for trial again.
But it doesn't really take into account the horror of your crime, the frequency of your crime necessarily.
It takes away all that judicial discretion.
And so the great possibility, from my perspective, is people who commit crimes, especially in low-income communities, And repeat offenders are released right back into the community against which they offended.
Because there's no cash bail.
There's no incentive.
Now, proponents of this thing said, why is it that the poor should be required to come up with money?
Well, the same reason that the rich are required to come up with money.
So that there's a guarantee they'll return.
Well, what if the rich person doesn't have assets?
The judge can take that into account under current law.
Takes that into account.
But the judge has to set it high enough that I, as an accused person, may have to go to friends and family.
To borrow or I have to, yeah.
Yeah.
I may have to say to you, hey, Siamma, can you help me out here?
I am accused of a crime and I need to borrow money.
In your brain, you're going to say, I know Will.
And I kinda like him, but I'm not sure he's gonna show up.
Or you're gonna say, you know what?
I like Will.
This is clearly crazy and I know he'll show up.
So I'm willing to stake that bet.
Part of the whole process, in other words, is to throw the accused back on their social network to make sure that social network guarantees the return.
Holds them accountable.
Yes.
Holds that person accountable.
Thank you.
So that person returns for trial.
So no matter what the level of the bail is set at, the judge is calculating what your social network is capable of doing to influence you to return.
If I can't go out and find one person to help me pony up for that cash bail, that judge is going to say, you know, this is a guy who has probably burned through every social relationship he or she has.
And I don't know if I trust them out there.
They've probably turned a lot of their friends and family against them.
I'm going to keep them behind bars until they get trial.
So anyway, fortunately, I would argue, this thing did not pass.
It was a no vote.
Wildly a no vote.
And the folks who wanted to, I think, release people back into the wilds were pushed back once again.
But they'll be back.
Do you have any other final remarks?
Yeah, I think that it's important to take a look.
This is always my request when people are looking at a ballot.
When it comes to bond initiatives, the first thing you should look for is always vote no on a bond.
I just think that's the safest bet.
Also, look at who's backing it.
If a government union is behind any of these initiatives, the ultimate goal is not what's in the public interest.
It's what's in that union's interest.
They are very well-financed, government unions are in California.
A billion dollars a year they raise, just about.
A billion dollars a year, they are easily the most powerful forces in California's political system.
Not some private enterprise, not the Koch brothers, not some dark industrialist in Illinois.
No, it's our government unions that control the levers of government and really control our political process.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
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