If someone was performing a top-to-bottom "performance review" of state government with the declared goal of making it more efficient, effective and accountable, a critical examination of its system of levying and collecting taxes would be, one would think, a cornerstone task. What is, after all, more fundamental to the relationship of government to the governed than taxation? And California's system of state and local taxation, which collects roughly $100 billion a year, is particularly worrisome. It has evolved over decades and has become a monument to arbitrary, often nonsensical, policy-making - the disparate sales-tax treatment of hot and cold...