But when the covid crisis struck 12 years later, California’s $60m in savings cost it tens of billions in losses because it needed stuff, not money, and it had given away that stuff in order to save money.

The fault here lies upon the federal government, not California. Such critical supplies and services should not be left up to individual states that are not currency issuers. As the monopoly issuer of US dollars, only the federal government can provide those without suffering economic harm.

The hodge-podge response to the epidemic was largely due to the uncoordinated mix of abilities between states and federal departments. It ended up with those entities bidding against each other for the critical supplies without any oversight or central planning.

Since RayGun the demand for "efficiency" in our federal government has greatly enabled a rapid movement toward neoliberalism and its worship of "markets". This is mostly due to a misunderstanding of how our money is created and how our various government entities must interact with it. This is the result of uninformed fear of deficits, (net payments to the private sector for the resources and labor government uses).