California has apparently turned itself into Pennsylvania.

It's still our biggest, wealthiest state with 38 million people -- one in eight Americans.

It still has the sunshine, the beaches and the magnificent natural beauty that for 150 years have attracted and captured millions of migrants from New York and Pittsburgh to Des Moines and Mexico City.

So why, for the fourth straight year, has the number of people moving from California to states like Florida and Arizona exceeded the number moving into California from other states? And why was the annual net-exodus rate even higher in the 1990s?

Immigrants, legal and illegal, and a birth boom among mostly Latinos have kept California's total population growing every year. But last year its net loss of 144,000 in state-to-state migration exceeded every other state's. No. 2 was New York, which lost about 160,000.

A lot of Californians are moving back East today (if they can unload their devalued houses) for the same reason they and their ancestors moved out West in the first place -- to escape oppressive taxes, dead-end schools, traffic congestion and a breakdown of basic government services.

Sixty years ago, California was not just an empty natural paradise. It was a role model of good governance and opportunity.

Compared to the rest of the country, especially to over-governed, over-politicized, economically declining states like Pennsylvania, post-World War II California was a booming, upbeat utopia with lots of good jobs, cheap housing, low taxes and relatively few economic, cultural or moral regulations.

Back then, as urbanologist and longtime Southern California resident Joel Kotkin recently pointed out in a long article titled "Sundown for California," the state government was a positive force in the economic and social life of California that "laid the foundation for its remarkable ascendancy." Continued...