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Why California could slide into socialism — and how to stop it

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said recently that he fled socialism in the Russia with his family in 1979 and does not want California to end up in the same place.

The response was predictable.

The New York Times devoted more space to his girlfriend than to his argument. Progressives on X dismissed the warning as hysterical billionaire bluster over a modest five percent tax. 

Hyperbole, they insisted. Soviet comparisons are over the top, they claimed. Lighten up, they said.

Unfortunately, it’s not hyperbole. The reflex to call it hyperbole is the warning sign itself.

I am American, but my family is Czech. Brin reaches for Russia because it is his story. I reach for Czechoslovakia because its example is even harder to dismiss. The two histories tell the same tale, and that tale runs straight through California today. 

Tsarist Russia in the three decades before the Bolshevik revolution was richer than it had ever been. It industrialized rapidly on a gold standard ruble after Sergei Witte’s 1897 reforms. Output grew more than three percent a year. Per capita gains ranked among the fastest on earth. By 1900, Russia was the world’s largest oil producer. It boasted world class universities and a merchant class awash in wealth.

But here lies the irony at the heart of every revolution. Portions of that merchant class personally bankrolled the revolutionaries who would later seize their factories and shoot their grandchildren. Savva Morozov, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, wrote checks to the Bolsheviks. So did much of Moscow’s commercial elite. They thought proximity to the revolution........

© New York Post