California: America's Shadow Self

OK, had to fast-forward a bit before reading, to see if I could look forward to one of these articles. The bingo card almost scratches itself...

> If California were to deal with homeless addicts and untreated mental illness on a statewide level, as in Massachusetts

Hasn't California started working on this at the state level now with CARE? There's no mention of it in the article.

> If the state allowed parents to choose the best schools for their children and injected competition into school administration, student performance would undoubtedly improve.

Why does this increasingly sound like one of those libertarian blogs from the 2010s?

It also seems like a lot of the problems, possibly most of the problems, described here are well embedded all over the US, into Canada, easily located in Europe, and so on. But I'd hate to hand-wave everything like the author of the article.

Edit--Helpful to know: The City Journal - "A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute" ... The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (renamed in 1981 from the International Center for Economic Policy Studies) is a conservative American think tank [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy...