I watched the sunrise this morning with the distinct, metallic taste of bile in my mouth, which usually signals that California is in the news again. The Golden State—a moniker that now refers to the color of the urine staining the sidewalks of San Francisco—is currently embroiled in a feverish debate over a proposed wealth tax on billionaires. Naturally, because this is America in the twenty-first century, the discourse is a cacophony of screeching from two distinct groups of people I would happily launch into the sun: the performative Marxists who think money can be printed out of moral superiority, and the tech-bro oligarchs who believe their ability to code a dating app for dogs makes them exempt from social contribution.

Here is the situation, stripped of the breathless headlines and partisan hysteria: California lawmakers, having successfully managed their state budget with the fiscal discipline of a methamphetamine addict in a casino, are looking for a new vein to tap. The proposal is a wealth tax targeting the ultra-rich. It’s a ballot measure, which means we are trusting the general public—a demographic that struggles to merge onto the freeway without causing a pileup—to make complex macroeconomic decisions. The summary of the news tells us there is “confusion” regarding the proposal. Of course there is confusion. Confusion is the default state of the American electorate. Asking a populace that gets its news from TikTok dances to adjudicate the nuances of taxing unrealized capital gains is like asking a golden retriever to perform open-heart surgery.

The premise of the tax is simple enough for a child to understand, which is exactly why it is doomed. The idea is to tax the net worth of the super-wealthy, not just their income. On paper, this sounds like a delightful way to stick it to the guys who own three yachts and a private island where they hunt humans for sport. But in practice, it is a logistical nightmare designed by bureaucrats who have never run anything more complex than a bake sale. How do you value a private company every year? How do you tax assets that exist only as pixels on a screen? The state of California, an entity that cannot figure out how to pave a road in under a decade, now believes it has the competence to audit the fluctuating valuations of complex financial instruments held by people who can afford lawyers that cost more than the state's entire education budget.

Let’s look at the players involved in this farce. On the Left, we have the Sacramento kleptocrats. These people see a billionaire not as a symptom of a broken system, but as a piñata. They don't actually want to solve wealth inequality; if they did, they wouldn't have overseen the creation of a state where the middle class lives in tents while the Governor dines at the French Laundry. They want the money to feed the beast—the sprawling, inefficient, bloated apparatus of the California state government. They promise this money will fix schools, homelessness, and infrastructure. It won't. It will vanish into the ether of consulting fees, environmental impact studies, and committees formed to study the feasibility of forming other committees.

Then, turn your gaze to the Right, to the prospective victims of this shakedown. The billionaires are weeping into their organic, shade-grown espresso. To hear them tell it, asking for a sliver of their dragon's hoard is an assault on liberty itself. They threaten to leave. "We'll go to Texas!" they cry, as if threatening us with their absence is a bad thing. Please, go. Take your ego, your ugly modern architecture, and your God-complexes to Austin. Turn Texas into the same unaffordable hellscape you made of Palo Alto. Watching the tech elite panic over a wealth tax is like watching a tick complain that the dog is scratching itself. They invoke "Atlas Shrugged" as if they are titans holding up the sky, rather than middlemen skimming off the top of the advertising industry.

The real tragedy here isn't the tax itself, or the inevitable flight of capital. It’s the sheer stupidity of the mechanism. A wealth tax on *unrealized* gains is a lawyer’s wet dream. If a billionaire’s stock portfolio tanks, does the state cut them a refund check? The proposal creates an exit tax to stop people from fleeing, essentially turning California into a fiscal Hotel California—you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave without paying a ransom. It reeks of desperation. It is the move of a government that has run out of ideas and is now resorting to locking the doors and shaking down the patrons.

So, we are left with a choice between incompetence and greed. The state wants to steal money it will inevitably waste, and the billionaires want to hoard money they will never spend. The debate is "feverish" because the stakes are high for the participants, but for the rest of us, it’s just noise. It is two parasites fighting over a host that is already dead. Whether the tax passes or fails, nothing fundamental changes. The roads will still crumble, the homeless will still wander the streets, and I will still be here, nursing a migraine, wondering why humanity didn't have the decency to go extinct when we had the chance.