California has a strange relationship with business. Its lawmakers seem determined to make doing business more expensive, yet companies continue to operate there. Taxes rise, regulations accumulate, and new compliance requirements are added, but California remains home to some of the most successful companies in the world. That raises a question more interesting than whether California is “business friendly.” Why do businesses continue to stay—and how far can the state push them before they finally decide the benefits of California are no longer worth the cost?

It is sometimes helpful to preface an essay with a strong quote or two to give the reader direction in what follows. In this case, I found many quotes worthy of that task, so I cite the following and ask the reader’s forbearance:

“What the incompatibility of war and capitalism means is that war and high civilization are incompatible.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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According to polls taken in recent years (e.g., Pew Research, Gallup, Data for Progress), a solid majority of Democrats and well over a third of all Americans are in favor of replacing the cu

We have reached a point in contemporary society at which, when confronted with a claim, our immediate response is rarely to ask whether it is true. Instead, we ask who is making the claim, what perspective informs it, and what hidden motives might underlie it. The provenance of an argument seems, in some respects, to have come to eclipse its truth; suspicion has supplanted what was once a rational and logical mode of analysis.