☆ A good start by Mahan, but the wrong path forward
Mayor Mahan is right about one thing: Californians shouldn’t be asked to pay more until the government does better. But his spending proposal amounts to managerial reform, not structural reform, according to Peter Verbica, Candidate for U.S. Congress, CA-19. An Opportunity Now exclusive reaction.
Linking pay to outcomes, building dashboards, and modernizing IT may improve administration at the margins. But they do not address the core problem. As Mahan's own plan acknowledges, California has increased spending dramatically without improving results. That is not a measurement failure—it is a system failure.
California’s dysfunction is rooted in incentives and scale. We have pension obligations negotiated for political expediency, not sustainability. We have CEQA and zoning regimes that choke housing supply. We have public programs—particularly in housing, transit, energy, and education—that persist regardless of performance. And we have a political economy that rewards expansion of government rather than efficiency.
This is not a problem that can be solved with better scorekeeping.
We need a more fundamental shift—one grounded in the principles of a free-market system. That means pruning back the thicket of top-down, quasi-socialized solutions that crowd out private initiative and distort pricing signals.
Competition, as Hayek and other Austrian School economists taught, imposes discipline. Bureaucracy rarely does.
Where private industry can build housing faster, deliver energy more efficiently, or provide transportation more effectively, it should be allowed to compete—without being buried under layers of regulation and delay. The same principle applies to education: parents should have real school choice, with funding that follows the student and schools competing to deliver better outcomes.
California does not simply suffer from a lack of accountability. It suffers from institutional bloat and misaligned incentives. Until we reduce the scope of government where it is ineffective—and restore the primacy of markets where they function best—no amount of internal reform will deliver the outcomes Californians deserve.
We do not need better management or more plans alone. Mayor Mahan may favor clearly articulated plans, but the Soviet system produced detailed blueprints every five years and still failed to deliver prosperity. California does not lack plans—it lacks results.
What will work is something more fundamental: structural reform grounded in sound economic principles.
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