What works and what doesn't

For forest fires:

...good forest management—thinning overgrown tree stands, or making use of selective fire as a housecleaning tool in the forests—may help tamp down a probable upward trend in the severity of fires.

Easier said than done. Greens often oppose forest thinning as logging in disguise, while state air-quality officials, particularly in California, regularly fight forest managers over permission to start deliberate fires.

For gambling:

If prohibitionism really is driven by morality, then it is self-defeating. If you want to put the industry in the hands of dodgy dealers registered in Tuvalu or Vanuatu, if you want to guarantee websites without protection for children or restraints on compulsive gamblers, if you want to help money laundering and fraud, then prohibition is the policy for you.

There is an another approach, which has been tested with online sales of alcohol and pornography, and been found broadly to work. Internet gambling operations know more about their punters than casinos do. Owning a credit card is a good proxy for proof of age; each transaction is logged, so companies can tell who is betting excessively or at odd times of the day; they can tell where a computer is, and so abide by state laws. Registered, branded, taxed gambling companies are not perfect protection against the excesses of betting, but they are the best there is.

And what doesn't:

The absurdity of America's cotton subsidies is well known. Uncle Sam spends over $4 billion a year propping up cotton farmers, with the bulk of the money going to those whose operations are much larger than Mr Evans's. Cotton receives far more government cash per acre than other crops—in 2001, four or five times that of maize or wheat, according to a recent paper by the National Centre for Policy Analysis, a conservative think-tank. The losers are not just American taxpayers but some of the world's poorest farmers, as America's subsidised production pushes down world prices. Cotton prices have halved since the mid-1990s as America's subsidies have doubled.