California Has Banned Insurance for Car Drivers

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As everyone (apparently except the California Insurance Commission members) knows, insurance is the transfer of risk and fiscal responsibility for its realization from one party to another for an agreed fee that’s commensurate with the risk and expected cost being transferred.  The California Insurance Commission has eliminated that for California drivers, mandating that driving coverage be provided independently of the risk transferred.

California has banned auto insurance companies from considering gender when setting insurance rates for private passenger cars.
The Gender Non-Discrimination in Automobile Insurance Rating Regulation went into effect on Jan 1, 2019.

Never mind that men and women drive differently and represent different risks while driving.  This move makes differing risk irrelevant, and so it cancels the risk aspect of coverage for events occurring while driving.

Commissioner Dave Jones claims that the move will

ensure that auto insurance rates are based on factors within a driver’s control, rather than personal characteristics over which drivers have no control.

He’s being disingenuous or ignorant.  Again: what was being insured was actual driving performance, not gender.  That that performance is measurably different between women and men has been actuarially understood for decades.

One outcome of the Commission’s move will be to drive up coverage rates for women—who had enjoyed lower rates because they are lower risks, safer drivers.

Arrogance of the Left

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This is made blatantly, nakedly clear by New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.  In his State of the City speech last week, he laid bare the premier goal of the Progressive-Democratic Party, even above doing away with ICE and with our borders generally.  He said—and he meant every word of it:

Here’s the truth. Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.

His first sister is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) who wants to raise taxes on those wrong hands to 70%—or more; she, like her fellow Party apparatchiks, have articulated no limiting principle to such raisings, they’ve carefully declined to say how much is one’s “fair share.”

After that, de Blasio’s brothers and sisters of the Party want free education and free, single-payer medical care for all, including illegal aliens (remember their open border demand).

How to pay for all of this Party largesse?  The first goal: by taking all that money that’s in the wrong hands and giving to the correct, deserving holders of the money.

Mind you, who are the correct holders, who are the deserving holders, will be defined by those members of the Progressive-Democratic Party.  They’re the ones who Know Better than those with the money, those who’ve earned the money, how that money should be used.

It isn’t their money, anyway.  It’s the Party’s money.  Party generously will let us have some of it for a period of time, though.

Union Greed Realized

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Recall that the United Teachers Los Angeles union threatened to strike this week if they didn’t get their way.  Now they’ve gone ahead and done it, putting the education (such as it is in this district’s public—NTLA-manned—schools) of 500,000 children at risk.  For instance, at the Third Street Elementary School

[a] notice plastered on the school gate said that students will be gathered in the auditorium and the outdoor lunch pavilion area, instead of classrooms, during the strike, and overseen by administrators and teacher assistants.

No education allowed here, per the NTLA.

Recall the issue central to the union’s demands—the end of competition from charter schools that operate in the same district, sometimes in the same school buildings, and that attract students, who then do much better in school and get much better educations.

The union…cast the strike as a broader referendum on the growth of charter schools, which don’t have to follow some public-school regulations and whose teachers are largely nonunionized. Charter schools aren’t part of the contract bargaining….

In other words, charter school teachers have much greater flexibility in how they teach their students, and they aren’t bound by union demands regarding employment and employment parameters.  Charter school teachers also are regulated by the State rather than the union local jurisdictions.

What? Me Compromise?

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In a Wall Street Journal piece Sunday about the length of the current partial government shutdown—they’re touting is (as are most of the NLMSM) as the longest on record as though a partial closure is somehow comparable to a complete closure—Kristina Peterson, Michael Bender, and Rebecca Ballhaus closed with a description of a bill being developed by Senators Rob Portman (R, OH) and Jerry Moran (R, KS) that would pair DACA recipient legal status with funding for border security, which would include a wall.

However.

Democrats are unlikely to view the bill as a fair trade, as it swaps $25 billion in border security for legal status—and not a path to citizenship—for the young immigrants….

This would be just another example of the Progressive-Democrats’ absolute refusal to negotiate. Such a bill would move the DACA matter significantly in their direction, with nothing at all to prevent them from coming back later with a bill to move “legal status” to “path to citizenship”—the Reagan move of taking half a loaf today and coming back tomorrow for the other half.

The Progressive-Democrats only know “No,” however.

A Judge’s Error

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The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.