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This comment is actually instructive in explaining how California manages to waste enormous sums of public money. It isn’t “theft” in the narrow legal sense. Nobody is stuffing cash in duffel bags. But when taxpayers are compelled to fund projects that continuously produce almost no public value, the moral distinction between waste and theft starts to blur. Spending more than $17 billion to deliver a single mile of track is a concrete example. To a reasonable citizen, this understandably feels like theft, even if it passes every formal rule. The deeper problem is not corruption in the cartoon sense, but incentive failure caused by political capture. When one-party dominance persists long enough, success inside the system stops being measured by outcomes and starts being measured by activity. How many favored constituencies are paid, how many processes are satisfied, how many insiders benefit. Creating 16,000 union jobs becomes the metric of success, regardless of whether the project itself works. In that environment, the purpose of the spending quietly flips. The act of allocating money replaces the intended result of the work. Officials come to believe they have succeeded because they followed the political logic of the system, and they are genuinely confused when citizens object to the absence of results. Imagine if the private economy operated this way. Imagine the most unprofitable companies received more capital precisely because they failed, while productive firms were starved because they “didn’t need it.” Society functions only when capital flows increasingly toward effectiveness, not toward the largest failures. California’s public allocation system increasingly does the opposite…and then calls it success, because the people inside the system like @igardon actually *believe* it’s success.

m2jr ↗