Right now we observe that California is a top statist socialist state in the USA. How did it happen?

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I avoided this question for quite a while because I didn’t understand how to provide a detailed answer without falling into a tedious chronicle, which is not so much useless as it is meaningless on its own. Every tax increase and every tightening of regulations had its own unique reason, and digging into them is not the level of a popular channel.

To put it very briefly, California became “Commifornia” because its voters wanted it. It remains in this status now largely despite the will of the voters, but that is usually how socialism works: people try this drug because it is trendy and advertised everywhere, and then it turns out that it is easier to die than to get off it; thus California (as a system of effective resource management for the territory to improve the territory in the interests of its residents) is dying.

It seems possible to get off this drug—the example of Thatcher’s Britain shows this. But relapses are also extremely likely, as shown by the example of modern Britain. Anyway, let us leave the medical metaphors and the abuse of holistic constructs alone. I would like to draw attention to another point.

Generally speaking, Konkin did predict the crisis of the state, because if people had the opportunity to use political methods for the constant and irreversible reduction of state interference, there would be no need for agorism. At the same time, Californian crypto-anarchists indeed seriously pushed humanity toward the implementation of useful agoric technologies, so Konkin’s notion that California would play an important role in the struggle was also justified to some extent.

Thanks to open borders between states, many agorists and libertarians found it easier to bail out to tiny New Hampshire rather than try to turn the tide in massive California; therefore, those who wish to focus on business and legal politics rather than survival naturally leave the leftists alone with the governments they chose, heading where their efforts will bring more benefit. For some reason, Konkin warned against such tactics as a kind of simple and wrong solution, calling it anarcho-Zionism. On the other hand, he also predicted the emergence of certain agoric ghettos where people could effectively resist the state’s attempts to regulate them into oblivion, thanks to the fact that their concentration there would be higher, making it difficult for hostile agents.

In short, Konkin was hardly concerned with the fate of a specific state that was one way or another in the hands of statists, and nitpicking that his territory is not the current locomotive of agorism is like nitpicking Ayn Rand for the absence of Rearden Metal based on an iron-copper alloy in our lives.