While much, perhaps most, of California’s political class is cheering not only a proposed “wealth tax” on billionaires, but almost giddily daring said billionaires to leave California, young people in particular might just wonder what driving tech moguls out of the state would mean for our state’s future.

Driving billionaires to relocate to more friendly states costs more than lost tax revenue: Most billionaires became rich by building a successful company. When they leave, they tend to take their companies with them.

So there are job losses to the state as well.

While California’s best-known tech hub remains Silicon Valley, there are other such centers of innovation throughout the state – including here in Carlsbad.

Many of our tech companies were founded by smart, ambitious young engineers and managers who realized they could only go so high in an existing operation and so struck out on their own. Apple was founded by two veterans of Atari and Hewlett-Packard, whose proposal to build a personal computer was turned down by both firms. (And Atari was founded by two veterans of Ampex, a designer of stereo equipment.)

Intel was founded by employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, which had itself been founded by eight employees of Shockley Semiconductor. Qualcomm was the creation of employees who met at the networking firm Linkabit.

So when public policies drive successful entrepreneurs and their companies away, there is more than a loss of tax revenue and jobs: These policies carry a huge opportunity cost, as the next generation of startups founded by those companies’ talented employees will not begin operations in California.

Even without a proposed wealth seizure by Sacramento, businesses (and residents) are already fleeing our state due to the government’s hostility toward private enterprise – including H-P and Oracle. And even those that have stayed (so far), like Apple and Google, have located recent expansions in other, more business- and employee-friendly locales, costing California residents thousands of lost jobs.

And here in North County, semiconductor testing firm FormFactor will close its Carlsbad plant later this year, costing our community more than 100 jobs.

California’s voters have got to start telling their representatives that hostility toward the business community is no longer acceptable. With the state and many local jurisdictions upside down on their pension plans, it is beyond comprehension how the same folks responsible for managing our public assets are so blind to the costs of their reckless political amateurism.

Business as usual in California can no longer mean driving our homegrown businesses away.

Jim Trageser is the former opinion pages editor of the North County Times and the Oceanside Blade-Citizen. He lives in San Marcos.