Nothing is quite as Californian as the lose-lose policymaking of hamstringing oneself for a pointless cause and failing in that cause anyway.

California’s water policy over the last several decades has amounted to suffocating farms in the Central Valley, the most important farmland in the country, in order to save fish species that are dying out even when they get all the protections activists demand. This split-the-baby approach has helped no one, neither the farmers nor the activists and their cherished fish.