California Democrats seem intent on making it clear that the only thing they do efficiently is destroy businesses and innovation.

California is looking to bring down its regulatory might on retail and grocery stores by heavily restricting self-checkout stations. The bill in question would mandate that employees who supervise self-checkout be working for only that reason, meaning that they could not perform any other functions when they are tasked with supervising.

It would also mandate that employees can supervise only two self-checkouts, meaning that if your local Walmart or Target has eight such stations (as mine do), the store would have to have four people working in that station who can do nothing else on the clock other than watch the stations.

This bill would supposedly serve two purposes, one being to supposedly “create” jobs that automation would eliminate, when in reality this would just encourage stores to shut down self-checkout stations rather than employ useless workers. The other is supposedly to help combat theft, as stores are saying they are suffering losses from self-checkout thefts.

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There are two problems with that latter goal. For one, the stores themselves can already decide to put extra employees at self-checkout or shut down those stations if they want to address thefts. No one asked the California legislature to make management decisions. The second problem, of course, is that this would be California Democrats again ducking the reality that state law is too soft on shoplifters. Rather than strengthen criminal penalties, the state wants to scapegoat self-checkout stations.

This would be yet another perfect example of California’s legislative incompetence. The state makes it onerous to employ people with high taxes and regulations, then with a one-size-fits-all mandate cracks down on automation that it is inadvertently incentivizing businesses to adopt, and tries to paint it as a jobs program and crime policy while ignoring actual crime policy. It is efficiently inefficient, a perfect combination of contradictions and ignorance. As always, in California’s Democratic supermajority legislature, it is another threat that hangs over businesses unless they actively reject it.