SACRAMENTO, CA--In the film Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood is chasing a murderer across Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. But the detective’s rather hefty partner can’t climb the fence, so Eastwood tells him to "take a walk, fatso." That message applies to California’s ruling class, for similar reasons.

Last month, the state health department issued a study lamenting the eating habits of Californians and predicting an apocalyptic fate, with disease and death soaring, if they didn’t change. On talk shows, sonorous nutritionists wove a tale of woe and pestilence, as though all edibles had suddenly become contaminated with anthrax spores. Drastic action was necessary to avert catastrophe. No one seemed interested in the more basic question of whether the state of California is even qualified to tell its residents what to eat.

Here’s the news: It isn’t. In fact, California is a kind of national fat joke, a bloated, overweight state, freighted with useless agencies and rife with redundancy.

For example, there are 14 counties that border the ocean. The elected officials of these counties are entirely capable of running their affairs but California deploys something called a Coastal Commission. This additional layer of bureaucratic fat chokes the wishes of local voters. Then there’s the famous Board of Equalization.

What this agency has ever equalized remains a mystery, but it is ingenious at thinking of ways to fatten state coffers at taxpayers’ expense. For example, the Board proposed a sales tax for editorial cartoons, as though they were works of art purchased at a gallery. The "laugh tax" failed but members of the board, apparently upset with the lightning fast, efficient service provided by an unregulated Internet, are now lobbying to tax that too.

This is a state that is reversing privatization, firing private janitors and hiring civil servants to clean buildings at nearly double the cost of private contractors. Until recently the state employed elevator operators in the Capitol, state legislators and their entourages apparently being incapable of handling basic motor functions. Likewise, every Department of Motor Vehicles office in California fairly bursts with employees. Yet they are incapable of performing efficiently, wasting millions on computer systems that didn’t work. It gets worse.

In California education dollars must trickle down through four absorbent layers of bureaucratic lard: federal, state, county, and local. The State Department of Education jostles with superintendents, deputy superintendents, and managers with inflated salaries but nebulous job descriptions. Higher education is stuffed with chancellors, vice chancellors, and, my favorite, "Acting Assistant Vice Chancellor," a veritable Dagwood sandwich of redundancy. Yet we get little bang for all this bulk. As recent tests showed, only one student in four can properly read, and college grads are so deficient that the state’s high-tech industry must look abroad for employees.

If California government was making a good-faith effort to slim down and giving taxpayers good value and efficiency, then maybe they could dish out dietary advice. As long as they refuse to shed the lead, and employ people to think of ways they can get still fatter at our expense, they should limit their food advice to state employees. A stroll around the capitol will confirm that many need it.

--K. Lloyd Billingsley