Top Ten Reasons to Read “The Closed Loop”
Avoid serious FOMO -- And Read (Or Listen To) One Of The Most Important Columns EVER Written On This Site. Don't wait, do it this weekend. It's a 15 minute investment you will not regret.
On Thursday afternoon, I published the most important thing I’ve ever written for this Substack: “The Closed Loop: How Public Employee Unions Built California’s Most Powerful Political Machine.” It’s long. It’s documented. And it explains who actually runs this state. Here are ten reasons to read it — any one of them will do.
1. The most pro-labor president in American history said public employee unions were a mistake. FDR — the architect of the New Deal — warned that collective bargaining “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” If a Republican said that today, it would be called union-busting. Roosevelt wrote it in a letter. I quote it.
2. Ronald Reagan started it. Yes, that Ronald Reagan. In 1968, Governor Reagan signed the law that first gave California’s government employees collective bargaining rights. The most famous Democrat of the century warned against this machine. One of the most famous Republicans helped build it. Nobody’s hands are clean — which is exactly why the story has never really been told.
3. The biggest political spender in California isn’t an oil company or a tech giant. It teaches your kids. When the state’s campaign watchdog added up a decade of political money, the California Teachers Association had outspent every corporation, every trade association, every interest group in the state — $211 million. Second place wasn’t close. Second place was another government union.
4. Florida’s kids were at their desks. Yours were on Zoom. The virus was the same everywhere. The politics weren’t. California’s classrooms stayed closed longer than almost any state’s, and the essay shows you who was in the room when that was decided. I watched it as a political professional. I paid for it as a parent.
5. I watched deputies retire at 50 on a full pension — and report to a new job Monday morning. Pension in one hand, paycheck in the other. From my years inside the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Not one of them broke a single rule. That’s the scandal.
6. Sacramento nearly regulated your favorite freelancer out of existence — on purpose. AB 5 caught musicians, journalists and truckers who never asked to be “protected.” Uber and Lyft bought their freedom back with the most expensive ballot campaign in California history. The cellist couldn’t write that check.
7. A California city fired a quarter of its cops and went bankrupt anyway. Stockton — at the time the largest city bankruptcy in American history. The police force shrank. The pension checks never bounced once. Read that again, then read the essay.
8. There’s free scholarship money on the table for California kids right now. Newsom won’t touch it. One signature. No state money required. He almost certainly won’t sign — and the essay walks you through exactly which organization has spent thirty years making sure ideas like this one die quietly.
9. The most damning part? Nobody is breaking the law. No bribes, no smoke-filled rooms, no villains. Every person in the system is acting rationally — and that should scare you more than corruption would. Corruption can be prosecuted. A machine just runs.
10. One state broke its machine — in a single legislative session. When Wisconsin changed the rules, government-union political power collapsed within a few years. California’s machine is built on California’s rules, and rules can be changed. That’s the part the machine would prefer you not read.
Read “The Closed Loop” RIGHT HERE. Then send it to a Californian. They’re paying for the machine — the least they deserve is a look at the blueprints. Because if the essay proves one thing, it’s this: closed loops do not open themselves.
