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When Government Fails: The Orange County Bankruptcy. By Mark Baldassare. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvii, 317 pp. Cloth, $48.00, ISBN 0-520-21485-4. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-520-21486-2.)
Considering the possibilities of reincarnation, Democratic political strategist James Carville once quipped, "I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." Well, not everybody, not the citizens of Orange County, California. In March 1995, three months into the largest local bankruptcy in United States history, voters in this conservative suburban county-the home of Disneyland and the birthplace of Reagan Republicanism-- refused to approve even a one-half-cent sales tax increase to help the county out of its hole. With much evidence from his own local polling, Mark Baldassare's When Government Fails suggests that the county's middle-class majority saw the bankruptcy as government's problem, not theirs. There must be no new taxes...