California is a nice place to live, most of the year the weather is decidedly more pleasant than, say North Dakota for instance. Overall I think we would find that more people want to live here than in a bunch of other states (I don't want to touch off a debate on the relative merits of other places, so please just bear with me here, I agree not everyone wants to live here). The law of supply and demand would indicate then that it would cost more to live here. It costs more to buy a house, it costs more to start and run a business, rent costs more, food costs more, workers need to make a higher wage so they can afford to live and work here, and so on right across the board. At the same time it is however a stinkin' desert and without the EPA it quite possibly would soon or already be uninhabitable.
Stands to reason (to me anyway) that it costs more to run a government here too then. Perhaps the problem then is business owners who are so big that they can afford to move the business to a less desireable location while continuing to enjoy living in a more desireable location. With of course a summer home in Montana and a condo in Vail. I know I can't do that because my business is such that I have to be there every day, I am guessing that your's is not either as if it were you would most likely already have done so and we wouldn't hear you complaining.
I do not really know what the solution is, perhaps if we just got rid of all those pesky poor people (leaving just enough to pick our crops, and clean our houses, and oh yeah, work in our businesses) then we would not have these problems. Wait maybe you are way ahead of me on this one and that is why you have the views that you have on health care. I wonder how long it would take for them to all die off.