>I’ve thought about this quite carefully, and I’m convinced we need to kick California out of the union. There is too big of an impedance mismatch with the rest of the country, and it creates and exports too much economic inequality.

I agree about one thing. California actively drives economic inequality.

Here's my theory about the entire economy of the US transforming since 2000.

Thanks to globalization manufacturing jobs went to China and other countries. This caused a decline in rural communities where a handful of companies were exporting manufactured goods to the rest of the US and some of them exported to foreign countries. However, sales within USA were the primary driver of revenue. The internet makes centralization easier. This means you can set up a headquarter anywhere and reach the rest of the USA. Similar events happened with industries starting to consolidate. Think of Walmart eating local companies. Centralization shifts profits to corporate headquarters. More money is leaving the local town than is coming in. This causes a death spiral, especially when the city has over leveraged itself on infrastructure which is a common problem for small towns. The new winners are the headquarter cities. Lots of money is leaving from small places and entering big places. Big cities have more headquarters so they are benefiting massively. This drives urbanism a shift from rural places to urban places.

Automation increases productivity at the expense of obsoleting skills. This causes a shift to low skill jobs of which there aren't many as the manufacturing jobs have moved to China and the high skilled jobs moved to cities. So now the country is suffering from a labor surplus. Low skill labor sees immigrants as competition. So the cycle of right wing activism starts.

The chasm between skilled and unskilled is now so great that the best answer is to retrain people. America has collectively decided that employers do not have to train their employees. Instead everyone gets access to student loans and must fund their own education through future income. In principle this is okay if you make sure people don't over leverage themselves on a degree that cannot bring in the required income, something that is very common when there is a low skill labor glut. Okay, but the loan program enabled millions of students to enroll, surely a two digit percentage of them did get a high skill job in the end? This is where there story starts involving California.

California is massively benefiting from urbanization, globalization and automation. It's the ultimate place to go after your got your fancy STEM degree. The desire to prevent new housing and discourage people from coming to California is absolutely egoistical from this perspective. SF is supposed to be an economic power house for millions of people who are forced to leave their hometown because of economic decline. Yes, they will be rich, but only after they spent years working in SF. From that perspective California is sabotaging the success of the entirety of the US by running a dysfunctional state.

>It will simply create a large contingent of people who can now outbid them on access to fixed resources, which will make their lives worse.

Land is fixed, housing isn't. You can always build more.