The New York Times reports that many small restaurants and fast-food chains, desperate to hang on to profitability to some extent while the government conspires to kill it, are trying to introduce wine and beer on their menus as a way of drawing customers in.
Seems like a no brainer, right? Well, it’s not easy. You have to get permits, deal with vast regulations on supply chains, navigate the amazing complexities of laws at all levels, retrain employees, slow down service by checking IDs, annoy your customers by declining to sell them what they want, rely only on employees above the age of 21, expose yourself to massive new legal liabilities, and even hire private guards to watch for underage drinking.
The article reports all this without a consciousness that every one of these headaches is imposed by government. They could all go away with changes in the law. A free market would solve all of these problems.
So one really does wonder whether and to what extent it was actually easier to buy and sell liquor, wine, and beer during Prohibition than it is today. You took one giant risk but you didn’t pay taxes, navigate thousands of regulations, police your customers, face terrible liabilities or anything else. You bought the stuff and sold it, period.
Is it really so obvious which is better, hampered legality or look-the-other-way illegality?
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ID checks – to “protect the children”.
Of course, when you tell people that consumption of alcohol for children was a common event until very recently as a method to battle against water borne illness (natural water isn’t healthy), they’ll stare at you dumbfounded. And, of course, prohibition is still alive and well in a more literal sense – blue laws. Indiana still prohibits alcohol sales on Sundays, for example.
J Murray could you please expand on your point that children consuming alcohol was commonplace until recently? If you can, please provide some links. Thanks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer
about half way down, describing the Pilgrims diet in the 1600s
http://www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/homework-help/whats-dinner
Thanks Guy
They most certainly do. Being one that likes to do grocery shopping on Sunday, I curse Indiana every dang week.
Hehe. I’ll think about you when I head down to the local QT to get a 30-pack at 6 a.m. on Sunday.
I forgot to add: Though there may be a change in the wind. You can buy at restaurants and bars on Sundays; that’s been the law for as long as I can remember.
But now breweries and wineries can sell their wares on Sundays too. I think it’s well past time to get rid of all the Blue Laws in this state, and it might be soon.
The black market is always simpler than a gov’t controlled market. The only real barriers to overcome in the black market are production and distribution outside the approved channels without getting caught. In the gov’t controlled market you have barriers every step of the way in order to comply with the seemingly infinite number of laws, regulations, and guidelines.
It is a trade off. Hire an enforcer yourself, he’ll do what you tell him but you can’t pretend you aren’t a criminal. Get others to hire the enforcer for you, you have to let him hurt you some to keep up pretenses. You get the added bonus that you get to pretend you are not a crook. Of course, you may have to let the enforcer kill some of your business lines. And he will likely eventually kill too much of your business.
What, what solution did you have in mind, of the free market solving the problem of preventing public alcohol consumption by those not mature enough for the responsibility? Or did you just mean the free market would solve it in the sense of selling alcohol to anyone who can afford it?
Just so your meaning is clear…
Maybe he meant libertarians should kill everyone cause that’s what they always mean, amirite?
I mean simply that society can handle this the way it did since, oh, the beginning of time. The state is no substitute for social authority, social convention, individual discernment, self discipline, the court of taste and manners, parental oversight, and the like. Society is not made of idiots and the state is not a committee of wise overlords.
“You bought the stuff and sold it, period.”
Or, if you lived in this part of Tennessee, you’d set up a still along one of the hundreds if not thousands of spring-fed streams and make it and sell it yourself. After many years, money and dead bodies, the feds have finally pretty much–but not completely–exterminated moonshiners and their poteen hereabouts, but meth has tried to filled the income void the fed created when it closed down those stream-side stills. One of those niggling unintended consequences is that meth is much more dangerous to make and far more harmful to consume than John Barleycorn ever was. Furthermore it is probably a safe assumption that some of those would-be moonshiners who haven’t switched to making meth are instead wards of the government to some extent and costing the feds many times more than their untaxed shine ever denied the Treasury.
Bobbie Burns, poet laureate of distilled spirits said:
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and plough’d him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
But the cheerful Spring came kindly on’
And show’rs began to fall;
John Barleycorn got up again,
And sore surpris’d them all.
The sultry suns of Summer came,
And he grew thick and strong:
His head weel arm’d wi pointed spears,
That no one should him wrong.
The sober Autumn enter’d mild,
When he grew wan and pale;
His bendin joints and drooping head
Show’d he began to fail.
His colour sicken’d more and more,
He faded into age;
And then his enemies began
To show their deadly rage.
They’ve taen a weapon, long and sharp,
And cut him by the knee;
They ty’d him fast upon a cart,
Like a rogue for forgerie.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell’d him full sore.
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn’d him o’er and o’er.
They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim,
They heav’d in John Barleycorn-
There, let him sink or swim!
They laid him upon the floor,
To work him farther woe;
And still, as signs of life appear’d,
They toss’d him to and fro.
They wasted o’er a scorching flame
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us’d him worst of all,
For he crush’d him between two atones.
And they hae taen his very hero blood
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise;
For if you do but taste his blood,
‘Twill make your courage rise.
‘Twill make a man forget his woe;
‘Twill heighten all his joy:
‘Twill make the widow’s heart to sing,
Tho the tear were in her eye.
Then let us toast John Barleycorn,
Each man a glass in hand;
And may his great posterity
Ne’er fail in old Scotland!
That reminds of Abraham Simpson describing being a grifter in the old days: “it was either that, or work”.
Ned, you must be near me here in Knoxville. It was just the other day that I was thinking that we’d surely be better of if the hollers were full stills instead of meth labs. It seems like almost everyone will agree with Mark Thornton’s obvious conclusions when asked direct questions, yet still refuse to make the connection that just because prohibitions are practical and theoretical failures, they should not be attempted.
In Oregon you can buy bottled beer from the grocery store and take it home with you. You can go to a brewpub restaurant and take home craft beer in a growler. But you can’t go across the street to the Chipotle to order a burrito and beer to go, you can only drink the beer at the Chipotle because of the bizzaro alcohol laws here.
The liquor stores are a state protected public-private operation in Oregon. Liquor distribution is controlled by the state. Stores have no identity. There is no Larry’s Liquor. Instead it’s just “Liquor” and on receipts it says Liquor Store #20, #8, etc. Liquor store hours of operation are controlled by the state. In their wisdom after the 2008 crash the state decided to reduce liquor store hours to “save money” and they’re now closed for what would be peak hours, e.g. Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday. Oregon is basically a blue state too.
Alcohol laws are pretty strict for places that want to sell alcohol. However, in the black market during the Prohibition Era, no one was monitoring the way alcohol was being made, and that resulted in tons of people dying. Read “The Poisoner’s Handbook” that details alcohol-related deaths during the Prohibition Era. Therefore, do you deal with the alcohol regulations or the increase of alcohol-related deaths?
Hi Shevonne,
True, a lot of people died or were sickened by inferior, poorly made alcohol during the Prohibition Era. But I’d like to know how many of those deaths and illnesses, as a percentage, were at the hands of the government. You mention the ‘Poisoner’s Handbook’. Well one little detail that emerges from the ‘Poisoners Handbook’ is the fact that the Coolidge’s government deliberately poisoned the booze during prohibition and did so, it seems, gratuitously.
http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/
The admitted figure is some 2000 deaths and illnesses (afaik) from the government laced booze. God knows what the real figures are. And this is just the one instance we know of. I see no reason to believe this was an isolated case.
As for your second point you present a false dilemma. There are other options, freedom – market – based options. For example there is the option of personal responsibility -letting people take care of themselves. It’s up to the adults in the room to make sure the alcohol they drink is safe. One option in this regard is the possibility of private firms who specialize in safety certification of booze. Second, the market will quickly decide this one as those vendors who peddle bad booze will go out of business in short order and/or be sued into the ground, and imprisoned in some cases
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