Walter Williams notes that excess taxation (which, in the limit, becomes outright prohibition) leads to in the street scofflawery. Followers of P&aP know this already, but here is the full story.

Cigarette Smuggling, crime popularized way back when in the movie “Beverly Hills Cop“.

Daylight Saving Wastes
Energy, Study Says
By JUSTIN LAHART
February 27, 2008; Page D1

(See Corrections and Amplifications item below.)

For decades, conventional wisdom has held that daylight-saving time, which begins March 9, reduces energy use. But a unique situation in Indiana provides evidence challenging that view: Springing forward may actually waste energy.

Ref: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120406767043794825-UOLcfJA8×9Gw9ozbCz77MiLmtaE_20080327.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

Of course, part of the purpose of daylight savings time is to let humans use the daylight, but it is interesting that it COSTS us energy, so (to the extent that saving energy was the original idea), we again see that good intentions converted to policy without first confirming the science can be a bad bad bad idea.

Now excuse me while I sip a glass of corn-based ethanol while I bask in the global warming pool.

This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.

Ref: NPR: Dissecting People’s ‘Predictably Irrational’ Behavior