Californian proclaims: Welcome Texans

California appears open for business.  That is, open for Right to Work states to come in and court businesses to relocate in their states.  Steve Malanga has the story publicsectorinc.com.

We’ve written before about the efforts of Texas Gov. Rick Perry to lure California businesses to his state, which elicited a scatological response from Gov. Jerry Brown. Relocation expert Joseph Vranich, who has done such a good job assembling the list of California firms leaving the state, has a revealing column  chronicling a further list of governors poaching in the Golden State, including Iowa’s Terry Branstad, Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett, South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard, and NJ’s Chris Christie, among others. Brown’s reaction has been typically colorful. He even called Iowa “the cold, empty and desolate hinterlands.” Brown’s attitude is reflective of a larger feeling within California’s governing elite which can’t imagine firms leaving the state for anywhere else. But the numbers say something else.

As demographer Wendell Cox has demonstrated, California has lately turned into a net loser of jobs to other states, when migration in and out of states by firms is considered. Confronted with such numbers, California apologists will observe that job re-locations are a small contributor to net employment growth, which is true. A state is far more likely to generate new jobs from growth in existing firms or from start-ups.

As Vranich points out, California is now consistently rated by executives as one of the worst places to do business, mostly recently by Chief Executive magazine, where one executive observed that, “California is getting worse, if that is even possible.” Another tipped his hat to one of the state’s advantages, observing that, “California has the best labor pool,” but then he added, “and the worst government.”

People, of course, follow jobs, or maybe jobs follow people. Either way, California is also a net migration loser of people and capital these days.