Anti-business sentiment in CA

Some more examples of hostility to business among many in California, provided by Thomas Sowell in Criminalizing business: Part II. Excerpts:

A recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle vividly illustrates the anti-business mindset of many Californians. It dealt with the fact that Wal-Mart lost a referendum to allow the retailer to put a store in Inglewood, Calif.

According to the Chronicle columnist, Wal-Mart was "trying to bully its way into another targeted community." Putting an issue to a vote is called "bullying" when business does it, and the community where it wants to locate is a "target."

Among the other rhetorical flourishes of this indictment is that Wal-Mart tries to "crush the competition." What does such purple prose amount to? That some people prefer shopping at Wal-Mart rather than in competing stores, so some of the latter may end up going out of business as a result.

In all this venting of spleen against Wal-Mart in the Chronicle column, there is no mention of the cynical role of activists in depriving a low-income community of jobs and taxes. By flexing their muscle against Wal-Mart, Jesse Jackson et al. have shown those who want to locate businesses in minority communities must get their OK — and that does not come cheap. ...

Yet another example of the anti-business climate in California is a class action lawsuit against the Bank of America and Wells Fargo for charging people for cashing paychecks when those people do not have accounts at these banks.

California law makes that illegal. But federal law says otherwise, and this will all have to be sorted out in appellate courts, at the taxpayers' expense.

Why such a law in the first place? Are there no costs to cashing checks? Do the people who do this work not get paid?