19 Jul 2010

Privatizing Liquor Sales

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In California, you can buy hard liquor in the supermarket. In Nevada, Karen and I were leaving early one Sunday morning after a fishing trip and stopped at gas station to fill up. At 7:00 AM on Sunday morning, there were premixed cocktails for sale at the cash register and a few people were sipping on their drinks while playing video poker. Nevada’s my kind of state.

Back East, here in Virginia, just as in my native state of Pennsylvania, an archaic regime going back nearly a hundred years to the days of Prohibition restricts liquor sales to state stores. Selection is inferior, prices are uncompetitive, and they can’t even be bothered to special order brands they don’t customarily carry.

One very good thing coming from electing conservative Republican Bob McDonnell governor is the apparently coming fulfillment of his campaign promise to get the Commonwealth of Virginia to move into the 21st Century and start treating its citizens as adults.

Let’s hope the Governor does not allow bible-thumpers and greedy politicians to stand in the way.

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Surellin

I was visiting Carter County in Kentucky a few years ago, and my native guide said that the county was “dry” – because that’s how the moonshiners and preachers wanted it. I suspect that the semi-Prohibition of liquor law in some states owes itself to a similar unholy alliance of social conservatives and greedy government. So…. if, as I have heard, the “culture wars” are coming to an end and social conservatives will become less significant than they have been, can we assume that asshattery like punitive liquor laws will become less common? I hope so – although that obsession might be replaced with Madame Obama’s obsession with our Body Mass Indices.



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