California Assemblyman Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, wants to make happiness more central in policymaking now that he’s leaving after the longest reign as Assemblyman in California history.
He created a first-in-the-nation group to study the issue, called the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes, which held its first public hearing this week.
The idea of the government making people happy should focus on fewer regulations and lower taxes. Anything else is probably not their business.
Rendon said it would be “silly” for lawmakers not to study how they can make people happier.
“Because if we have everybody clothed, everybody housed, everybody has a job and they’re miserable, then we’ve failed at what we’re trying to do,” he said, adding that lawmakers should think about happiness as a priority in policymaking.
He thinks the government is Big Daddy. He takes everyone’s money via taxation, pools it, and gives everyone a job, housing, and food. Now, he also wants to make them happy. Sounds expensive. A Lamborghini would make me happy.
Their survey is hard to believe. In California, three-quarters of adults say they are “very happy” or “pretty happy,” while 26% say they are “not too happy,” according to a September 2023 survey from the Public Policy Institute of California. Adults aged 18 to 34, people who are renters, those without a post-high school degree, and Californians with an annual household income of $40,000 or lower tend to be less happy than others.
To me, getting the government out of people’s lives and eliminating punitive taxation and regulations would lead to happiness. Maybe Californians have been in the sun too long.
You can comment on the article after the ads and subscribe to the Daily Newsletter here if you would like a quick view of the articles of the day and any late news:
Happiness committee? Next thing they’ll be prescribing frontal lobotomies for happiness. From the land that gave us comet cults, cool aid, killer hippies, and the black panthers.
If the sick rainbow butt-f*ckers in Sacramento want to create happiness they can begin by throwing out illegals, lowering taxes, quit pushing pedophile agendas and start working on actual infrastructure instead of the DEI agenda.
He can now win consultant contracts from the committee. He just padded his retirement. Now he can make more money with less work.
I lived there 3 years. People there are friendly, lots more than in Chicago, much more than in the northeast. It was refreshing. But they are also somewhat plastic. I considered it to be Hollywood-ish.
Clearly, Assemblyman Rendon has never read Aristotle. Happiness isn’t something that can be sought or studied directly. It’s the consequence of “a life well lived.” But being a politician and a Democrat — a California Democrat, at that — I’m sure the suggestion that some things that are impossible to government is an idea he’d dismiss with a snort of contempt.
I think he is trying to sell what we would call artificial happiness, a California phenomena.
Got to watch that stuff. It causes cancer in lab rats.