Just when you thought San Francisco had regulated every conceivable human behavior, a supervisor has found one more thing to ban: smoking on outdoor bar patios.

An ordinance currently under review by the Board of Supervisors would prohibit lighting up in the one place smokers retreated to after being kicked out of indoor bars decades ago. If you're keeping score at home, that means San Francisco has now essentially told smokers: you can't smoke inside, you can't smoke in parks, you can't smoke near buildings, and now you can't smoke in the outdoor spaces specifically designed as a compromise for you. At some point, the city is just going to hand people a card that says "please stand in the middle of the Bay."

Look, nobody's arguing that secondhand smoke is pleasant. And private businesses have every right to set their own rules about what happens on their property — which is exactly the point. Why does the Board of Supervisors need to mandate this? If customers don't want to sit near smokers, they'll choose smoke-free patios. If bar owners see demand for smoke-free outdoor spaces, they'll create them. It's this beautiful, elegant system called the free market, and it works remarkably well when you let it.

Instead, we get another layer of regulation in a city already drowning in them. San Francisco has open-air drug markets operating with near impunity, tent encampments blocking sidewalks, and property crime that makes residents shrug instead of bother filing a report. But sure — let's allocate legislative bandwidth to stop someone from having a cigarette with their beer on a patio.

The Board of Supervisors has a seemingly infinite appetite for telling adults how to live their lives and a mysteriously limited appetite for tackling the problems that actually drive people out of this city. A legal, tax-paying adult enjoying a legal product at a private business shouldn't require government intervention.

Priorities, San Francisco. We're begging you.