Advancing a Free Society

As his Proposition 30 hangs in the balance, California Gov. Jerry Brown continues an old-fashioned barnstorming campaign in its support.

But a recent encounter with potential voters in Southern California reveals that the challenges to the governor’s efforts are as much the media as the message. Specifically, voters are getting harder to reach through traditional “channels” (in this election, this has also been a problem for pollsters struggling to gauge public sentiment in a world transitioning from land lines to cell phones).

Speaking with folks at a coffee shop in San Diego during his Prop 30 tour, Brown asked whether they even knew about the measure.

Several patrons did not.

The governor followed up with a telling question: “Do you watch TV?”

When one woman in the group responded that she didn’t, Brown – as reported by The Los Angeles Times – “seemed exasperated.” He fired back: “That’s the problem. How do you reach the non-TV voter?”

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In a popular appearance on CNN’s “GPS” program last fall, arch-Keynesian economist Paul Krugman wondered whether a possible route to greater government spending would be to concoct a story about an imminent Martian invasion: “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better”.

Amongst the myriad ethical, political, and economic problems with this proposal, is the very simple fact that thinkers like Krugman are never around when it’s time to dismantle his imagined “Department of Earth-Land Security”. As Ronald Reagan quipped, “a government bureau is the closest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

The recent machinations over the discovery of $54 million in “hidden assets” at the California Department of Parks and Recreation (which oversees the Golden State’s public parks turn the Princeton prof’s scenario on its head. The department, which was tasked by Governor Jerry Brown with closing 70 of its 278 parks last fall, worked with Marin County Assemblyman Jared Huffman to craft AB 42 – a measure signed in to law by the governor – which eased regulations in operations agreements between local civic organizations and individual parks.

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