As we noted, in San Francisco last year criminals pulled off nearly 30,000 car break-ins and police made arrests in only 1.7 percent of the cases. This is the legacy of Proposition 47, the 2014 Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes initiative, which would have been better titled the Theft Empowerment Act. To charge an offender with felony burglary, the law requires prosecutors to prove that a car’s doors were locked, a requirement both perverse and impractical. As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, “getting victims to testify that they locked their doors is an often-fruitless struggle for the San Francisco district attorney’s office because many victims are tourists from out of the state or country.” Some politicians fear tourists will stay away and have attempted to reform Proposition 47.

Three months ago, the Food and Drug Administration began investigating how to reduce e-cigarette popularity among teens. Their initial efforts consisted of gathering information from e-cigarette producers and providing educational materials to teens on the health risks associated with vaping (which e-cigarette companies were already doing).

Shortly after, the FDA declared youth e-cigarette use to be of “epidemic proportions,” requiring immediate regulatory action. As FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb remarked, “all options are on the table” to avoid “addicting a generation of youth on nicotine through these products.”

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous 8-0 ruling on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s attempted designation of private property in Louisiana as “critical habitat” for the benefit of the endangered dusky gopher frog. Had the agency succeeded, it would have denied the owners of the land from being able to develop it as they might choose without any compensation. What had made the case so unusual is that there was no evidence that the dusky gopher frog, which is found only in Mississippi, had ever lived anywhere in Louisiana during the past five decades.

During the recent election campaign, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters he would continue building the $98.5-billion bullet train, which is “not a train to nowhere.” The part about boring through the Tehachapi Mountains, however, “is an open-ended question.” For the $17 billion water tunnel project, Newsom wanted a “more modest proposal,” perhaps a single tunnel, because “the status quo is not helping salmon.” He would advance “a fresh set of ideas” on the tunnel and the train, hardly the only holdover projects that await his attention.

Back in 2004, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed the $3 billion Proposition 71, which promised a host of life-saving cures and therapies for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases through embryonic stem-cell research. The cures and therapies would generate revenues and royalties for the state, so it was billed as a win-win for the state. The measure created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which in the early going handed out 91 percent of research funding to institutions with representatives on its governing board. The CIRM board even overruled the Institute’s own scientific reviewers, who twice rejected a proposal to fund a for-profit company on whose behalf CIRM founder Robert Klein had lobbied. CIRM also became a soft landing spot for over-the-hill politicians like Art Torres, a former state senator and non-scientist.

For the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year, the U.S. Postal Service reports that it successfully boosted its annual revenue by $1 billion over the previous year to $70.7 billion, marking a boom year for its mail and package delivery services. Unfortunately, it also spent about $3.9 billion more to provide those services than it took in during the year, a $1.2 billion increase over the loss it recorded in its 2017 fiscal year.

If that doesn’t sound like a success, that’s because it isn’t, which is why the editors of Investor’s Business Daily are calling for the nation’s postal service to be privatized.

By its own admission, the post office is doomed. Buried deep in its 10-k government filing is this bleak statement: “Existing laws and regulations limit our ability to introduce new products or services, enter new markets, generate new revenue streams or manage our cost structure,” it said. Imagine a private company telling its investors that.

This can’t go on. Privatization is the only viable option. The White House last summer proposed to do just that, by either selling off the post office or bringing in private managers to run it. At least a profitable postal company that can sell its shares to investors, manage costs, hire and fire workers, and expand and close lines of business would have a chance. Today’s U.S. Postal Service doesn’t.

Nationalism is a weird ideology. It would be easy to imagine that it was cooked up by rulers looking for a means of keeping their victims submissive and cooperative.

A nationalist gives moral priority to others within the boundaries of his nation-state, or at least to his fellow citizens there, and he acts accordingly in political affairs. Yet even in a small nation-state, practically all these people are complete strangers. One has never met them, never will meet them, has only the foggiest idea of the sort of people they are. Maybe they speak his language, but many do not. Maybe they are of the same race, but many are not; and even if they are, so what? Maybe they share his cultural affinities, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they are not even decent people; in fact, many are complete creeps or criminals. Why should anyone give any kind of priority to them merely because they happen to be located within the boundaries of the same tax farm?

Nationalism is, among other things, a gigantic aggregation error. It takes a huge, enormously diverse collection of people and imagines that each and every individual in the collection is somehow better than each and every individual in other nation-states. The more you think about it, the more idiotic it becomes.

President Trump’s new rules for boosting ethanol production represent a big step backwards for the U.S. consumers, both economically and environmentally.

That won’t come as a shock to Beacon readers, since William Shughart and Arthur Wardle provided an excellent overview of ethanol’s many problems shortly after President Trump issued those rules in October. What may be a surprise is how much more damaging ethanol production and consumption are proving to be from new evidence.

For example, because ethanol packs less energy per gallon than gasoline does, vehicle owners can expect to get even lower fuel mileage from the expansion of E15 fuel (a blend of 15% ethanol with 85% gasoline) under the new mandate to include more ethanol in automotive fuels, which would be 4% to 5% less than they would achieve if they only filled their vehicles with 100% gasoline. Today’s vehicle owners already pay a fuel efficiency penalty of 3% to 4% lower gas mileage from the E10 ethanol-gasoline fuel blend mandated under the older ethanol content rules, where the new rules will require even more fill-ups.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if each American, rather than lining up in support of politicians who promise to wield state force to Make America Great Again (or in pursuit of some equally preposterous and meaningless slogan), resolved instead to make himself or herself a better person. Who among us cannot be a better spouse, a better parent, a better son or daughter, a better friend, a better neighbor, a better employee, a better employer, a better business partner, a better member of our community?

The beauty of this alternative dedication is that it requires no state force whatsoever, no passage of 2,000-page statutes, no stationing of armed forces at the border, no dropping of bombs on strangers thousands of miles away. And it is feasible. It is simply impossible to imagine anyone who has already done everything possible to make himself or herself a better person. All that is required is that each of us act within the bounds of his or her feasible set, and the only thing that stands in our way is ourselves.

I just returned to the United States after a short-term teaching stint at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia.  It seems I’ve arrived home on the tail end of a controversy over the venerable Marbury v. Madison decision.  According to luminaries at the Washington Post, anyone who questions the greatness of Marbury is a “crackpot” and unfit to serve in the national government.

Here’s how the Post describes the decision:

Decided in 1803, at the dawn of the new republic, Marbury v. Madison is the foundational case of American constitutional law. It represents Chief Justice John Marshall’s declaration that the Supreme Court possesses the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution and determine the legitimacy of acts of Congress.

California gets about half of its income-tax revenue from the top one percent of earners, which makes for high revenue volatility during an economic downturn. Back in 2009, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger set up the Commission on the 21st Century Economy to deal with this problem. The commission recommended cutting tax brackets down to two and replacing the corporation tax and state sales tax with a 4 percent tax on business activity, but the legislature failed to vote on the proposals.

As Dan Walters of CALmatters notes, after governor Jerry Brown took office for the second time and grasped the threat of volatility, “he clearly didn’t want to take on such an immensely complex issue with a high probability of failure.” So Brown will leave office “with the fiscal time bomb still ticking away and likely be succeeded by someone with less ability, politically and intellectually, to do what needs to be done.”