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Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

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Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#131

Post by pbhjpbhj »

chrisdevereux wrote: post #52
twic wrote: post #10

Okay, what the heck is with this business of secondary markets for licenses in the US? You can sell a liquor license? You can sell a taxi license (aka medallion)? Why? How does treating licenses as property make any legal sense, or serve any public good? In the UK, if you want to sell booze from your shop, you write to the council and apply for a license. They check you and your shop out, and if you seem okay, they g…

If nothing else, why not make the licenses non-transferrable and auction the available licenses? Seems like they're missing out on an easy source of income by letting third parties benefit from the restricted supply.

Presumably the answer is corrupt officials? That seems to be the only thing that makes sense - they don't want the State to make the money they want their friends to make it and, of course, share it with them??

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#132

Post by eli_gottlieb »

tptacek wrote: post #75
typicalrunt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students. But isn't this supply meeting demand? If there were too many taxis, wouldn't the supply eventually cull itself when nobody can make enough money?

The subtext behind an invocation of Wrigleyville is that drunk bar clientele from outside the area makes it difficult to live in. Wrigleyville is a running joke among people who live on the north side of Chicago.

And now I suddenly feel the need to stand up on behalf of people four years younger than myself and say: drunk college douchebags are people, too. They have equal rights and an equal stake in governance, too.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#133

Post by notahacker »

rayiner wrote: post #47
twic wrote: post #10

Okay, what the heck is with this business of secondary markets for licenses in the US? You can sell a liquor license? You can sell a taxi license (aka medallion)? Why? How does treating licenses as property make any legal sense, or serve any public good? In the UK, if you want to sell booze from your shop, you write to the council and apply for a license. They check you and your shop out, and if you seem okay, they g…

You make a license trade-able when you care about limiting the supply, but you don't care who gets it. The purpose of a taxi medallion is to limit the total number of taxis, and the purpose of a liquor license is to limit the number of establishments that sell liquor.[1] But the government doesn't care who has the license. Making it trade-able ensures that the license goes to the person or organization that values it…

Arguably the state should care about who gets the licenses, but even if it didn't, the state can easily ensure that licenses go to the people or organizations that value them most by auctioning them on an annual basis (and offering incumbent licence-holders first option to renew the licence at the market determined lease rates) whilst collecting the licenses' appreciation in value

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#134

Post by bobcostas55 »

yesbabyyes wrote: post #97
Pxtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ontario takes it one step further, even. We have a government run monopoly on liquor and wine sales (the LCBO) and a non-government-run government-protected monopoly on beer sales (the Beer Store). To make that clear: the only company that is allowed to run a beer store in Ontario is The Beer Store. The Beer Store is owned by an association of InBev (Belgian company) and Molson/Coors (headquarters in Denver). So Onta…

In Sweden, we have a state monopoly on all alcoholic beverages, except for bars and restaurants. We have very high taxes on liquor, not so much on beer and wine. The monopoly is called Systembolaget (The System Company). They are among the biggest buyers of alcoholic beverages in the world, and they have a mean assortment. Private import is regulated, but it's way more relaxed within the EU countries. Systembolaget w…

>and they have a mean assortment.

This is one of those ridiculous lies that Swedes like to tell themselves. There are single stores in France and Germany with a larger assortment than the entire beställningssortiment. Anything even slightly obscure requires ordering from abroad, with all the crap that entails.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#135

Post by SilasX »

typicalrunt wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a license trade-able when you care about limiting the supply, but you don't care who gets it. The purpose of a taxi medallion is to limit the total number of taxis, and the purpose of a liquor license is to limit the number of establishments that sell liquor.[1] But the government doesn't care who has the license. Making it trade-able ensures that the license goes to the person or organization that values it…

take a walk through Wrigleyville in Chicago on a Friday night, where you can see an endless parade of taxis picking up an endless parade of drunk students. But isn't this supply meeting demand? If there were too many taxis, wouldn't the supply eventually cull itself when nobody can make enough money?

Yeah, eventually. In the meantime (so the argument goes), the oversupply of taxis can make it really unpleasant.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#136

Post by pbhjpbhj »

stonemetal wrote: post #121
bane wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many areas it is just like a drivers license and that regime works pretty well. It's a weird desire to arbitrary limit licenses. What's the purpose of that? Limiting the number of sellers doesn't really do much to limit buyers or consumption. It sounds like a bad idea that's carried forward out of momentum not something that needs to be fixed. It should be replaced with the better approach.

It is an attempt to prevent a tragedy of the commons. NY doesn't have enough road capacity to handle all of the taxis that would be profitable in a free market. Therefore they limit the number of taxis to ease congestion.

>NY doesn't have enough road capacity to handle all of the taxis that would be profitable in a free market. //

Are you sure it will increase the overall number of vehicles on the roads?

There can only be more taxis if there is sufficient demand to pay for them and their drivers. If there are more taxis then there's a downward pressure on prices which, yes, creates the possibility of more demand. But reality doesn't follow that simple a model - it's probably chaotic - as more taxi availability will potentially reduce car and bus usage. If it doesn't reduce car usage then who's getting in the taxis? Taxis are better optimised resources in urban areas than car-ownership. Perhaps people who normally use a bus or walk can now afford a cab - can't have poor people using our transportation /s. Some people will switch to buses from cars because a bus is fine for many journeys and now it's affordable to do bus+cab journey or to do buses mostly and get a cab occasionally.

Suppose there are so many people who have a clean driving license, can pass an advanced motorist test and pass a hospitality test (eg good enough language skills) and pay for a car that passes the necessary road-fitness and emissions tests and thus those people can get a city taxi license. There are so many licensed cabs that the road traffic gets slowed down. Then people will take the bus or walk; there will be less demand and drivers will have to do other jobs. If there are still too many cabs then the barrier for entry can be increased - add your cities second language to the hospitality requirements, add a skid-pan test, increase the ecological requirements on the cars used.

Isn't that the free market at work?

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#137

Post by danbmil99 »

Same arguments can be used against rent control. In NYC, loft leases in newly trendy nabes can garner up to $5M in "key money". The rent regs are nearly impossible to phase out, because both landlords and some renters benefit by them, though arguably they hurt the market as a whole and are patently unfair to first-time residents.

Regulation of commerce always risks unintended (though often forseeable) consequences.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#138

Post by hibikir »

cobrausn wrote: post #130
IvyMike wrote: post #59

Philip K. Howard has a new book out: The Rule of Nobody. (Note: I haven't read it, I've just seen a few interviews and considered buying the book.) The premise is that the fact that laws are constantly added but almost never removed is crippling us. Also, unfair laws are almost always unfair in someone's favor, and the groups benefiting will defend those unfair laws tooth-and-nail, and the morass of laws becomes even…

A longtime wish of mine is that every law ever written came up for review every decade or so, providing ample opportunity to adjust and remove laws to fit changing cultural norms. There is probably a downside to this that I'm not seeing, not being a lawyer and all that.

There are quite a few downsides.

The first problem is that now you have to dedicate a whole lot of work to maintenance. Even if this was done in good faith, you'd have millions spent just reading and rubber stamping laws. Legislatures get little done as it is to add more work.

Then, we have the problem of getting the legislature to take this seriously. What stops gigantic omnibus renewals that, for all intents and purposes, lead to the same thing that we have now?

There's also the risks to partisan fighting over controversial laws. Imagine what happens to an impasse over immigration law, or gun control. The winner, politically, would always be the side that would be more capable of tolerating no law at all. This is far more politically charged than just keeping whatever was the consensus in the past.

So that proposal is only a good idea if you believe that having a harder to govern country is something you want. Rarely a popular opinion among people that make laws.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#139

Post by baddox »

jal278 wrote: post #106
dublinben wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get the government out of these areas. You can't have regulatory capture without government regulation.

That's true -- but implicit in that statement is that regulation is never desirable. What about situations where government regulation is desirable or necessary (e.g. limitations on environmental pollution)?

> but implicit in that statement is that regulation is never desirable.

Not exactly. What's implicit in that statement is that a structure with the physical ability to create and enforce regulations will probably create some effective regulations, and some ineffective regulations. Just like how a market will probably lead to some efficient outcomes, and some inefficient outcomes (i.e. market failures).

So the question becomes which structure (government or markets) can do better overall, or if there's some way to combine the two such that you get "the best of both worlds" which is better than an all-or-nothing approach. My belief is that markets can do better overall than a pure command economy or a mixed economy, primarily because governments (at least modern republics) are, at the end of the day, somewhat subject to market forces in the form of elections, lobbying, personal incentives of government officials, etc., This makes the whole "let's use government to solve some common market failures" idea seem fairly silly to me. If we as a society can't aggregate our desires effectively enough to avoid a market failure (e.g. to fund a public good, like a highway system [0]), why should we expect to be able to aggregate our desires effectively enough to give legal authority to an organization to use violence to avoid a market failure?

[0] Using the broader definition of "public good" that includes club goods, and assuming the highway system isn't so congested that it can be considered rivalrous.

Re: Rum Deal: America’s booze laws are terrible

#140

Post by baddox »

lucisferre wrote: post #24

You should try Canada's laws for a while. Some of the highest taxes on alcohol in the world, almost no province allows drinking outside homes or licensed establishments (so be prepared for a $300+ fine for having wine at a picnic). All of this managed through archaic licensing systems run by bureaucratic power-tripping morons.

What's so good about that? That sounds approximately as bad as the situation in the US as described in this article.
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