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Editor’s Note: The essay below city journal.
I was born in Sacramento in the 1980’s. During long drive trips to visit relatives in Palm Desert, my family would occasionally stop by to see the tar pits known as La Brea in Los Angeles. I remember being trapped in bubbling Gilsonite mud, with no hope of escape, and silently watching reenactments of prehistoric mammals such as mammoths, wolves, bison, lions and saber-toothed tigers.
Recently, I felt the same way. It feels like time is stuck, suffocated, and suspended. But my predicament was not caused by the natural world, but by the California government’s deliberate quagmire of humans.
Nine years ago, I left my home state and moved to the Pacific Northwest, but I couldn’t get past the Sacramento bureaucracy. At the time, I was running a non-profit film studio and documentary foundation and was thinking of moving the company to Washington state. But I got some bad news from my lawyer. Nonprofits cannot simply leave the Golden State. He recommended maintaining a California corporation and establishing an associated corporation in Washington.
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For seven years, my attorney and accountant created two sets of statements, reports, compliance documents, and tax returns. One for California and one for Washington.
After years of this bureaucratic two-step process, I have finally decided to cut ties with California. I formed a new nonprofit corporation in Washington State and filed for dissolution of an old nonprofit corporation in California.
It was then that the real problems began. I have spent the past 18 months writing, calling, filing, signing, notarizing, petitioning, and mailing information to the California Secretary of State, California Attorney General, and others. All because they wanted to close one company.
FILE – July 17, 2022, California State Capitol in Sacramento. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Submissions may be accepted, rejected, or forwarded to another department. The letter assures us that the process is nearly complete, but then we also receive letters with new regulations and requirements. A recorded message will instruct you to leave a voicemail. No one will call you back.
The message from California is undeniable: there is no way out.
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What is the reason? First, sheer bureaucratic incompetence. California is a sprawling state with a vast and isolated public sector. My mother has had a career as a state attorney, but after decades of service, she sees government agencies actively undermining their own mandates and undermining the quality of life of their citizens. she concluded.
The second reason is greed. At a time when many aspiring residents are leaving the state because of exorbitant costs, high taxes and dysfunctional cities, California is trying to trap them in a web of bureaucracy. State legislators have even proposed an “exit tax,” which would require former California residents to pay taxes for 10 years after moving out of the state. The bill was voted down but will probably come up again.
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FILE – California Governor Gavin Newsom heads for a press conference in Half Moon Bay, CA on January 24, 2023. (Dai Kanno/MediaNews Group/East Bay Times via Getty Images)
The motive is punitive. La Brea captured, dissolved, and fossilized megafauna of the past through nature’s cruel indifference. But in the national bureaucracy, human hands stretch, tangle and restrict.
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My predicament itself is a minor one. I was in paperwork hell for a few years. But it symbolizes a bigger problem magnified with the addition of millions of residents, businesses and ventures.
My family settled in California. My father is from Italy and my mother is from Detroit. Because there were few chances in my hometown. But what if the Golden State becomes an iron cage? Can it be resurrected? If not, where can people go instead? And will nations reach out and follow them into the future?
California’s current leadership has secured its rule and resembles a Latin American one-party state more than a northern competitive democracy. State legislators are rapidly devouring legacies and squandering past productive capacity. They extract, they seize, they coerce, but they produce nothing.
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As long as California’s leaders can come up with scapegoats such as billionaires, tech companies, and oil companies, the state will keep enough of its citizens in limbo as needed to avoid the long-term consequences of its policies. will be kept to However, it will eventually be liquidated.
My hope is to complete the exit before it comes.
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