You will drink the liquor the government wants you to drink

On Friday, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf “vetoed a bill that would have privatized the sale of wine and liquor while liberalizing the rules for selling beer in the Keystone State.”

Wolf’s reasons for the veto defy common and marketing sense, but fall well within Democratic Party reasoning. Allowing private businesses to compete with government stores “would result in higher prices for consumers” and “less selection for consumers.”

Remember, everything Democrats do or propose is for consumers. And, one might logically assume, against producers.

As Jacob Sullum points out at reason.com, “Other things being equal, more competition leads to lower prices, so it is hard to see why Pennsylvanians would have to pay more for a bottle of whiskey if the state monopoly were replaced by profit-driven businesses competing against each other.”

I wondered about liquor prices in nearby, private-business stores. Sullum provides comparison.

“If you compare the prices charged by the PLCB to the prices charged by, say, Total Wine & More across the border in New Jersey, you'll find that customers generally pay more for liquor in Pennsylvania: for example, just picking three products I often buy, $30 vs. $25 for Bulleit rye whiskey, $52 vs. $44 for 10-year-old Ardbeg Scotch, and $44 vs. $37 for Herradura reposado tequila (all in 750-milliliter bottles). Total Wine also has a bigger selection: 354 varieties of Scotch, for instance, compared to fewer than 100 at the PLCB.”

State governments have been in the tax business for as long as the nation has existed. But isn’t it anti-American for a taxing entity to also have monopoly on sale of the taxed item?

http://reason.com/blog/2015/07/03/vetoing-liquor-privatization-pennsylvani

Link to story at http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/