Evoking a level of public surprise not seen since the last grizzled Japanese World War II straggler was found subsisting on coconuts and taro on some abandoned Pacific outpost, California regulators recently discovered -- less than 200 miles from such capitals of modern governance as Sacramento and San Francisco -- a creature long believed to have been extinct for generations, that being a prospering domestic industry not yet crippled by environmental regulation!

Regulators quickly got to work, of course. The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District last week -- just in time for Christmas -- approved the nation’s first ever air pollution controls on wineries, requiring the 18 largest wine producers in the eight-county region to reduce the levels of ethanol, methanol and other organic compounds released as grapes ferment.

Those compounds can react with sunlight and heat to form ozone.

Not to worry, though. Vintners such as E&J Gallo can satisfy the requirement of the new shakedown by paying neighboring industries to reduce their pollution instead. (Associated Press accounts specifically mention neighboring dairy farms, meaning the concept of an animal “flatulence credit” no longer belongs solely in the realm of political satire.)

Or, the vintners can simply “choose to pay into a fund the district will use to help other communities and industries reduce their pollution.”

Note the nice words “choose” and “help.” They do make a cash shakedown sound so much more pleasant, don’t they?

The regulators always start out playing nice. Let’s look at where another industry stands, 20 years after regulators started “helping” your neighborhood baker.

Ever walked or driven past a commercial bakery and detected the pleasant aroma of fresh bread baking? Wrong. That’s not a pleasant aroma, that’s a “major contaminant of concern known as a volatile organic compound (VOC)”, according to the lunatics now in charge of our “environmental protection.” Specifically, most any state’s air pollution control Web site (try www.epa.state.oh.us/dapc/sba/bakeries.html) will now inform you “The primary VOC emitted from bakery operations is ethanol. The ethanol produced by yeast metabolism and other VOCs combine in the atmosphere to form smog.”

At www.bakingbusiness.com/bs/channel.asp?ArticleID=27140, Mari Cornell of Baking & Snack magazine reports “It’s been almost 15 years since the baking industry became embroiled in environmental regulations. Since that time, clean air standards have become increasingly more stringent, and bakers have spent millions of dollars installing emission control systems that offer little return on investment in an effort to meet these requirements.”

Just how much smog do California wineries generate? Not much. Churning out 338 million gallons of wine per year -- 70 percent of California’s production -- San Joaquin Valley vintners generate only an estimated 788 tons of these supposedly evil fumes. (Has anyone checked the landfills?)

But who cares? If it’s standing still, send it a bill. Apparently determining that housing costs also aren’t high enough in California, the board of this same SJVAP Control District decided, at this same meeting, to make home-builders pay a new penalty of up to $780 for each new home ... unless they build enough bike lanes.

All under a threat that federal highway funds will be cut off if they don’t try something ... no matter how silly.

Yes, industries eventually adapt, as the bakers have. But every such bizarre regulatory assault drives up costs a little more, cutting into profit margins and making domestic products a little less competitive on the world market.

The end result? Businesses relocate or fail to add new jobs. Squeezed by the lack of new jobs and the higher costs imposed on everything (like ... housing?) by such regulatory regimes, residents now flee jurisdictions like California in droves.

Arriving in lower-tax, less regulated bailiwicks like Nevada, they then proceed ... to go to the polls and elect office-holders who will impose precisely the same kinds of regulatory regimes they just fled.

“There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you,” said Will Rogers.

But it was Will Shakespeare, in “Twelfth Night,” who noted “Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.”