California, where per capita spending in constant dollars has more than tripled in five decades, is burdened by the sort of growth-inhibiting government that has plagued some American cities. Writing in The Weekly Standard, Joel Kotkin, author of the forthcoming book "The City: A Global History," distinguishes between America's "aspirational" cities and "Euro-American" cities. The former — e.g., Atlanta, Charlotte, Reno, Boise, Phoenix, Orlando, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Fort Myers — are thriving. The latter — e.g., Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia — are experiencing social fragmentation as government's clients fight over dwindling scarce resources, and many of these cities are losing population, often to the aspirational cities.

Euro-American cities, where teachers unions prevent improvements of public education and "municipal welfare states" keep living costs high, increasingly attract affluent and often childless liberals: Seattle, Kotkin says, "has roughly the same population it did in 1960 but barely half as many children." Euro-American cities have, in varying degrees, the malady known in the 1970s as "the British disease," when Britain was called, as Turkey once was, "the sick man of Europe."

The malady is the result of a perverse cycle: Public sector unions produce, through their power to elect allies, high levels of social service spending. This results in a constantly expanding demand for government spending, and ever more public employees and hence still more union power.

The British disease was in America by 1975, in New York City, which effectively went bankrupt. Writing in the winter 2005 issue of The Public Interest ("Gotham's Fiscal Crisis: Lessons Unlearned"), E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute and Fred Siegel, a history professor at Cooper Union, recount New York's debilitation by "distributional public-sector politics that took the private sector for granted." By 1975, 340,000 people were on the city's payroll and more than 1 million were on welfare.

Adopting the language of therapy, Schwarzenegger says legislators are "like addicts" and his program is "an intervention": "You slowly narrow down how much you give them." It is quite a spectacle: An immigrant from Europe, familiar with the social sclerosis induced by that continent's statism, is toiling to inoculate this state against those ailments. Only in America.

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George Will's e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com. Washington Post Writers Group