The California Coastal Commission, created by voters in 1972, has been a disaster from the start, with even Jerry Brown — a champion of its creation — once calling its members “bureaucratic thugs.” Unelected appointees continue to exert their now-permanent powers to regulate land use within five miles of California’s coastline.

It’s best known, as Reason’s Brian Doherty wrote in 2009, “overriding local decisions and slapping multi-million dollar fines on people building small houses on existing concrete pads that could only be seen from the coast by a Superman with telescopic and X-ray vision.” Property rights activists cheered in 2003 when the courts found its makeup unconstitutional based on separation-of-powers issues, but lawmakers and the state Supreme Court saved it.

The Pa

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