In my last blog post, Caleb defended California against my critique, as he’s proud to be a Californian. Now perhaps I was too harsh, as CA has a lot going for it. But I still struggle to see the positive aspects of its progressive legal vision. Today, in advance of starting school tomorrow, I took a break to go to my shop and work on installing some air conditioning lines on a car build I’m doing, and I was yet again reminded of California Dreaming (of doing good by progressive legislation).

Proposition 65 has the superficially good intent of making sure consumers understand the risks of being exposed to chemicals that cause cancer. But the effect of this is to basically put warnings on almost everything:

WARNING: This product can expose you to [name of chemical], which is known to the State of California to cause cancer. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.

But many things could cause cancer, if the exposure was significant enough, and the resulting warnings are on things that have almost certainly no risk to the public, like my aluminum heater line ends:

Now there is certainly some cost to complying with this proposition, but my concern is with the benefits. In this case, I suspect that there are negative benefits, as marking up everything as risky is the same thing as crying wolf: no one will pay attention to the things that are more dangerous. When everything is dangerous, nothing is dangerous.

California has Big Sur and Redwoods. It has Napa Valley and endless sunshine. But it also has earthquakes and progressive politics. And I still think the latter are both hazardous to your health.