In one of the books I wrote, I outlined a scenario.
I used to come here via Forest Lawn Drive, which is a long stretch of road that runs along the cemetery. It’s kind of long—you guys may know it—and it doesn’t have cross streets or anything like that. So people tend to speed on Forest Lawn Drive because it’s just long, and there’s rarely any traffic on it. People in L.A., when there’s no traffic, think, “All right, let’s make up a little of this time.”
So the scenario is this: I would drive down Forest Lawn Drive and see, on one side of the road, a motorcycle cop who would back his bike up a driveway in a shaded, wooded area near the Jewish cemetery next to Forest Lawn. He’d be back there with his radar gun out, waiting for citizens to speed. I’d see him pull over soccer moms in minivans because, inevitably, they’re going 57 in a 45, and they get pulled over. Okay, fine.
On the other side of Forest Lawn Drive were many illegal immigrants selling flowers that they’d bought downtown to resell without a business license or any other form of regulation—just cash and carry. On the other side of the street, a bunch of people were selling flowers to those visiting their dead nana in a mausoleum.
The City of Los Angeles—and, in general, California—is this way: it has no interest in the illegal activity happening on one side of the street. That’s people engaging in illegal behavior.
Now, there’s a florist up the street, and that person has to carry all kinds of insurance, pay all kinds of taxes, worry about being sued by an employee for wrongful termination, deal with OSHA, and so on. There will be very vigorous compliance enforcement for the taxpayer, and it’ll be very vigorous for the soccer mom. But for the illegal vendor? No problemo.
If you go to SoFi Stadium, you can buy shots of tequila outside the stadium while illegal vendors sell you Tecate beer and “ghetto dogs” right next to cops who are doing security.
The city has declared a war on taxpayers and regulated them to death. But if you’d like to sell food illegally, you can pop up on any corner and do whatever you want. They walk right past those people. They never shut them down, and they never send them a summons.
The city council agrees with this. They agree that you should be regulated out of business and taxed out of business. But if you want to create a street black market where you sell food, you can do it.
By the way, every time you send a health inspector over to my business, you’re doing it under the guise of safety. Except you don’t seem to have a problem with people cooking whatever food they want on a sidewalk and selling it to people. No thoughts.
Once cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles do this—once you essentially look the other way for the homeless, junkies, illegal immigrants, criminals, or whoever it is, while shining a spotlight on taxpayers with overregulation, over-permitting, and trying to manage every grain of their lives, versus saying to illegal immigrants, “Go do whatever you want,” or to the homeless, “Go shoot up wherever you want or sleep wherever you want”—then you’ve lost it.
L.A.’s there. San Francisco’s there.
Look, if you’re not a taxpayer and you don’t have a checking account, whatever city you’re in, they’re not going to be nearly as interested in you as they are in the people who have a checking account, pay taxes, and can be compliant.
Basically, the compliant people are paying them. So it’s like, okay, who do you make money on? When you’re running a city and you need to keep the lights on, who do you go to?
Well, I’d go to Mark Geragos or Adam Carolla because those guys have businesses. We can charge them for permits. We can charge them taxes—land taxes, business taxes, whatever.
Okay, what about the homeless guy with a load of shit in his pants over there? Well, that guy costs us money. He doesn’t have anything. He costs us money because we’d have to take him somewhere, incarcerate him, process him, put him in housing, or something like that.
So that guy costs us money. These guys make us money.
Then they go, “Well, why don’t we focus full-time on these guys because they make us money, whereas the illegal immigrants, the homeless, and the junkies cost us money?”
You go, “Okay, well, that sounds like a plan.”
But you focus too hard on these guys. Those other groups start flourishing in terms of numbers, and then these guys say, “Fuck it. I’m moving to Nashville because I’m tired of you being up my ass if you’re not going to do anything about these guys. I’m running a business, these guys are camping in front of my business, and you want me to pay taxes on my business, but you won’t do anything about them.”
And when that starts, that’s the beginning of the end of a society.
