Thursday - July 12, 2007
California Political Tactics
California is at it again.
They've mastered the art of asking for the outrageous in order to get the merely
intolerable.That is, politicians in
California routinely propose laws that are so far beyond the pale that there is
almost no chance that they could ever be enacted.
Everyone knows the story about how if
you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out, but if you put
the frog in a pot of cool water and slowly heat it up, the frog remains content
until it is boiled. Whatever the truth of the science of that statement, it's a
popular analogy for how the political class takes away our freedoms slowly, one
by one, until we are
enslaved.Californian politicians don't
feel a need to take such slow measures. Their theory is to throw the frog into
boiling water, only to have it jump into a frying pan. They still get to eat
the frog legs, and they don't have to wait a long time. Meanwhile the frog is
happy to escape the boiling
water.Here's how it works:
Law makers want some sort of severe change in the
state. In this case, they want to encourage pet owners to be more responsible
about how their animals breed. So far so good. Feral animals are often an
expensive public health problem.
Their
method of encouraging this end is to dictate that all pets throughout the state
must be sterilized. This is absurd and would never get passed, and the
legislators know this. However, threatening this over-the-top plan allows them
to make a few concessions, in this case only sterilizing animals that have a
complaint lodged against them, and people are so relieved that they stop
protesting.
I saw it happen with CAFE
standards when I lived there many years ago. The new car emissions requirements
were absurd and would require pretty much every car more than ten years old get
sent to the scrap heap. Since I lived in Sacramento and worked the swing shift
at the time, I even stopped by to watch the protests on that law.
But what eventually happened is that
the politicians finally backed off and after the protesters left feeling
victorious, they introduced a version that was only marginally better that
eventually was enacted. It's really hard to get the protesters mobilized again
once they've gone home.
If the
California legislature proposed from the beginning that your pet would be
sterilized at your expense if a neighbor called to complain that it barked one
time, people would be outraged. After proposing that all pets everywhere be
sterilized, people feel like they're getting a good deal when they back down to
this also outrageous proposal.
The
Golden State politicians are good at this and it will likely work. Time will
tell. Californians are taught from young ages in government schools to organize
and protest the government, not for principles, but for the sake of having an
effect. The tactic of suggesting something so horrible that no one can support
it allows their school indoctrination to take over and abet the creation of an
almost as bad law.
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