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Regulations: A new study confirms what most people would take as a given — that smaller cars are less safe than bigger cars. So why is the federal government trying to force people into smaller, less-safe vehicles? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reports that of the 10 cars with the highest death rates over model years 2012-2015, eight are either small or minicars. On the other hand, of the 10 cars with the lowest death rates, four were large and five were midsize. The other was a Toyota pickup.

It’s not as if other states haven’t tried. Vermont, possibly the only state rivaling California in terms of its far-left politics, passed a single-payer plan into law in 2011. But Gov. Peter Shumlin, the progressive politician behind the law, took one look at the $4.5 billion annual cost — which would have required an 11.5% payroll tax, along with a separate tax on individuals of as much as 9.5% — and said “”No thanks.”” He quietly shut it down in 2014.

Inspired by the Clinton health care plan, a number of other states in the 1990s took steps toward a single-payer system.

Tennessee was one of them. “”TennCare bled so much money the sales-tax-only Volunteer State repeatedly scaled back the program and even considered adopting a state income tax just to pay for its health care plan,”” wrote Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, in a piece that appeared in IBD last month.

Kentucky, too, went down that road in the 1990s. It passed a new law requiring insurers to cover everyone who applied, no matter what. At the start of KentuckyCare, the state had 45 insurers. Within just a few years, it had only three. The plan was mostly dismantled in 2000.

In yet another awkwardly rational response to government intervention in deciding what’s “fair”, the blowback from minimum wage demanding fast food workers has struck again. Wendy’s plans to install self-ordering kiosks in 1,000 of its stores – 16% of its locations nationwide.

A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut. . . Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law. Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.