This and countless other legislative fiascos belies the notion of the inalienable competence of electorally unassailable time-servers.

Mitrovich crowns his argument by noting that even George Will, patron saint of conservatism, is a staunch foe of term limits. He quotes Will as saying, ”We have term limits. It’s called the ballot box,” which most readers have heard, since this persistent little aphorism (or some minor variant) has been echoed throughout the union for years.

”That’s right, the ballot box!” Mitrovich exclaims. “What is there about that you don’t understand?”

Oh dear. We’re all just so terribly stupid, aren’t we?

Mitrovich’s cited authority is not quite as apt as he hoped, however. He appears to have fallen behind in his reading. It is true that, once upon a time, Mr. George F. Will did oppose term limits. But he changed his mind in the early 1990s. Will even wrote a book making a thoughtful case for term limits, entitled Restoration: Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy.

As recently as last October, we find George Will in print chastising New York City Mayor Bloomberg and others for acting to circumvent term limits, concluding: “Yet again, the political class’ reaction to term limits is a powerful, indeed sufficient argument for them.”

Siding with the political class, and against the people, is par for political insiders and their dependents, of course. Mitrovich further shows his allegiance in targeting the citizen initiative. In the fourth prong of his program to fix Californian woes, he aims to strip Californians of the right to make law directly. After all, only when the people are deprived of any direct means whatsoever of countering the abuses and irresponsibility of the political class will it be easy as pie for politicians and special interests to carry on their abusive and irresponsible ways.

Part of the problem in California — as in the country generally — is institutional; part of it is ideological; part of it is that too many people want to eat their cake and save it for later, too.

But the institutional solutions required are not the kind that Mitrovich propounds; the ideological shift necessary runs to a pole quite opposite from his; the problem of greed and short-sightedness has been exacerbated (not assuaged) by the sort of politicians he admires.

Take each of Mitrovich's points and reverse them. Strengthen Prop 13-type limitations. Add more supermajority requirements to stem the cancerous growth of government. Keep term limits and apply them to more offices. And, yes, uphold the initiative and referendum as integral to citizen control.

Those are all better first steps to ensuring that California will not slide further into the sea of insolvency.