Forget Secession. Americans Want to Boot California From the Union.

Almost a quarter of Americans think

taking their state out of the union is a swell idea, a
Reuters/Ipsos poll told us not long ago. But why go yourself if
you can kick the other guy out? So Fox News hired
Anderson Robbins Research and Shaw & Company Research to ask
1,049 registered voters if they thought booting a state or two
to the curb was just good sense.

Of the 17 percent who thought that was a fine idea, there was an
overwhelming favorite for who gets tossed from the moving vehicle:
California.

Yes, the Golden State was the choice of a whopping 53 percent of
respondents who thought yanking a star off the flag would make the
world a better place.

New York came in second with 25 percent of votes, and Texas was
third at 20 percent.

I stand second to none in my astonishment at the degree to which
Californians have managed to render entirely uninhabitable one of
the nicest stretches of real estate on the planet. The state’s

dead-last business environment has driven
one-sixth of construction workers to the shadow economy, and
the official response has been to tighten the screws (with
cheerleading from the contracting industry) rather than loosen the
rules.

California ranks at 49 in overall
freedom, according to The Mercatus Center’s Freedom in the 50
States. Despite loosening of marijuana and marriage laws, it adds a
high incarceration rate, tough restrictions on guns, gambling, and
pretty much anything else you might wat to do to brutal economic
regulations.

So, yes. Booting California from the union, and from a say in
the laws under which we live, just might give the rest of us some
breathing space. But I can’t help but think, with a glance up and
down the East Coast, that we shouldn’t stop there.