America’s culture wars threaten its single market
For business, interstate trade is becoming a politically charged minefield
Living in California, as Schumpeter does, you would think licence plates called it the Red Tape State, not the golden one. Last August it led the world in announcing a ban on new gasoline-fuelled cars by 2035. In December its petrol prices soared higher than anywhere else in America, leading to an onerous cap on refiners’ profit margins. Early this year you could barely find an egg to fry, partly because of an animal-welfare measure from 2018 that keeps eggs off its shop shelves if they are laid in cages.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The disunited states ”
From the May 20th 2023 edition
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