There’s been a lot of news lately surrounding the 1st District
supervisor’s race between incumbent Das Williams and political first-timer
Laura Capps. I say first-timer because, as far as I know, Ms. Capps has never
been elected to anything. So this is the first political race where her name
appears on a ballot. And I suppose, as is typical when doing something for the
first time, you enter into it with certain high-minded ideals and, dare I say,
naïveté. And perhaps one of the areas that most first-time politicians are most
naïve about is the importance of money. Money, as another old saying goes, is
the mother’s milk of politics. If you try to get it out of politics, you’re
inevitably going to fail.
It’s impossible to get money out of politics as long as the
politicians who run government insist on inserting the large and heavy hand of
the state into every nook and cranny of our personal and professional lives.
Laura Capps, who seems like a nice and charming woman, isn’t running
a race around a set of policies and reforms that would suggest she’s interested
in limiting the size or cost of government. She seems more interested in
limiting the cost of campaigns. Now, to be fair, Das isn’t especially
interested in limiting the size and cost of government either. Both of them are
self-proclaimed “progressives” who seem to believe that more government
involvement in our local economy is the right approach, and that more
government spending on the problems we face as a society is just what the
doctor ordered, and that higher, especially higher regressive taxes, to address
shortcomings identified by a county staff that lives or dies on discretionary
revenues is an inherently sensible and even a moral idea.