04 « September « 2014 « Quotulatiousness

September 4, 2014

How post-Prohibition restrictions still plague many states

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: Beer, JimmyCarter, Marketing, Prohibition, Regulation — Nicholas @ 17:07

The American craft beer boom continues, but making the beer is only the start of the process of getting the beer into the hands of eager consumers. CEI’s Michelle Minton explains how rules crafted for the end of Prohibition now artificially restrict the craft beer marketplace, reduce consumer choice, and add unearned profits to favoured corporations:

After Prohibition ended, Americans could sell, produce, import, and transport alcoholic beverages, but home-brewing was still illegal until 1978 when then President Jimmy Carter signed legislation to legalize brewing in the home for personal or family use. In that year, the number of breweries was at its lowest point after the repeal of Prohibition. But in the 1980s, after states began to legalize brewpubs, the number of brewers began to rise. This development, along with easy access to capital in the 1990s and 2000s, aided efforts of modern craft breweries to change the laws in their home states so that they could brew more, self-distribute, and start the microbrew revolution.

[…]

Another hindrance for craft brewers are franchise laws, enacted among the states in the 1970s and 80s due to fears of brewers’ market power. With less than 50 brewers in the nation at the time — most of them large — there was a fear the big brewers could hold wholesalers hostage by threatening to walk away unless distributors bowed to the brewers’ demands. Since then, however, the landscape has completely shifted.

Although the number of wholesalers nationwide has declined, those remaining are larger and more powerful than almost all of the breweries in the nation. Yet, the laws remain, giving the wholesalers “virtual carte blanche to decide how the beer is sold and placed in stores and bars,” according to Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy.

In almost every other industry, a manufacturer unhappy with a distributor’s performance or price can terminate a contract in search of a better fit. This is not the case for beer manufacturers. Brewers wishing to switch from one distributor to another must go through long and costly legal battles. Hindy, for example, paid $300,000 to get out of a contract with a New York wholesaler. Yuengling COO Dave Casinelli’s experience was similar. In a phone interview, he noted that in his 24 years with the company, he couldn’t recall any attempt to switch wholesalers that didn’t end up with some legal ramifications.

Most state franchise laws not only make leaving a wholesaler hard, but they also create regional monopolies, known as “exclusive territories,” where a brewer is prohibited from selling through more than one distributor within a given area. This undermines incentives for wholesalers to compete by improving performance, increasing efficiency, or lowering prices. After all, distributors have little or no fear that a brewer will leave — because most of them can’t. As for consumers, they end up paying more because of this lack of competition.

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Orwellian newspaper editing as a game

Filed under: Gaming, Liberty — Tags: Censorship, Corruption, FreedomOfThePress, GeorgeOrwell — Nicholas @ 16:22

John Ryan linked to this article about The Westport Independent, which puts you in the position of a newspaper editor in an Orwellian world:

The Westport Independent, a self-described “censorship simulator,” places that editorial power in the hands of players during a time of political unrest in the city of Westport. It’s 1948, and rising rebellions against the government lead to a new bill banning any news outlets that do not comply with the Loyalist Government Guidelines. You play as the editor in chief of an independent newspaper entering its final weeks before the ban.

As editor, you control the censorship of articles, pick headlines, and arrange the layout to tell the truth of your choosing. As with Orwell’s 1984, “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Will you abide by rules and force-feed your readers the government’s narrative? Or will you defy their guidelines, and print the rebellion’s perspective instead? The city, divided into class-based districts, dynamically responds to everything you print. By shaping public opinion with the stories you choose, you shape the current events that unfold. And by shaping the events, you affect the stories you can cover.

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The very essence of government is a monopoly on violence

Filed under: Government, History, Middle East — Tags: ISIS, OrganizedCrime — Nicholas @ 09:19

Matt Ridley on how governments came about historically and how ISIS is trying to do exactly the same thing:

Nobody seems to agree whether Islamic State is best described as a gang of criminals, a terrorist organisation or a religious movement. It clearly has a bit of all three. But don’t forget that it aspires, for better or worse, to be a government. A brutal, bigoted and murderous government, its appeal is at least partly that it seems capable of imposing its version of “order” on the territory it controls, however briefly. It reminds us that the origin and defining characteristic of all government is that it is an organisation with a monopoly on violence.

The deal implicit in being governed is at root a simple one: we allow the people who govern us to have an exclusive right to commit violence, so long as they direct it at other countries and at criminals. In almost every nation, if you go back far enough, government began as a group of thugs who, as Pope Gregory VII put it in 1081, “raised themselves up above their fellows by pride, plunder, treachery, murder — in short by every kind of crime”.

Was Canute, or William the Conqueror, or Oliver Cromwell really much different from the Islamic State? They got to the top by violence and then violently dealt with anybody who rebelled. The American writer Albert Jay Nock in 1939 observed: “The idea that the state originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation — that is to say, in crime … No state known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose.”

Henry VII, the monarch who managed, after a century of gang warfare, to establish a monopolistic central government in England, funded his administration largely by extorting money from rich merchants with the threat of violence. That is to say, he ran a protection racket as blatant as any mafia don or IRA commander: pay up or lose your kneecaps.

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The new absolutism

Filed under: Environment, Liberty, Media, Science — Tags: ClimateChange, FreedomOfSpeech, Skepticism, TV — Nicholas @ 09:12

Brendan O’Neill on the rise of the absolutist mindset in science:

Who do you think said the following: “I always regret it when knowledge becomes controversial. It’s clearly a bad thing, for knowledge to be controversial.” A severe man of the cloth, perhaps, keen to erect a forcefield around his way of thinking? A censorious academic rankled when anyone criticises his work? Actually, it was Brian Cox, Britain’s best-known scientist and the BBC’s go-to guy for wide-eyed documentaries about space. Yes, terrifyingly, this nation’s most recognisable scientist thinks it is a bad thing when knowledge becomes the subject of controversy, which is the opposite of what every man of reason in modern times has said about knowledge.

Mr Cox made his comments in an interview with the Guardian. Discussing climate change, he accused “nonsensical sceptics” of playing politics with scientific fact. He helpfully pointed out what us non-scientific plebs are permitted to say about climate change. “You’re allowed to say, well I think we should do nothing. But what you’re not allowed to do is to claim there’s a better estimate of the way that the climate will change, other than the one that comes out of the computer models.” Well, we are allowed to say that, even if we’re completely wrong, because of a little thing called freedom of speech. Mr Cox admits that his decree about what people are allowed to say on climate change springs from an absolutist position. “The scientific view at the time is the best, there’s nothing you can do that’s better than that. So there’s an absolutism. It’s absolutely the best advice.”

It’s genuinely concerning to hear a scientist — who is meant to keep himself always open to the process of falsifiabilty — describe his position as absolutist, a word more commonly associated with intolerant religious leaders. But then comes Mr Cox’s real blow against full-on debate. “It’s clearly a bad thing, for knowledge to be controversial”, he says. This is shocking, and the opposite of the truth. For pretty much the entire Enlightenment, the reasoned believed that actually it was good — essential, in fact — for knowledge to be treated as controversial and open to the most stinging questioning.

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“David Cameron mouths foolish nothings” while “Obama … resembles a spineless invertebrate”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Middle East, Russia, USA — Tags: BarackObama, DavidCameron, ISIS, Leadership — Nicholas @ 07:25

Historian Max Hastings pours out the scorn toward British PM David Cameron and American President Barack Obama for their dithering and unwillingness to grapple with real world problems like the invasion of Ukraine and the rise of ISIS:

Suddenly, the world seems a frightening place. The beheading of a second American hostage by jihadist fanatics and the threat that a British aid worker will suffer the same fate has shocked the peoples of the West, as have few events since the Cold War.

We are uncertain how the Western Powers should respond.

At such moments, we turn to our national leaders for wisdom, reassurance and decision. Instead, we get posturing, dithering and waffle.

David Cameron mouths foolish nothings, proclaiming that Britain would commit ‘all the assets we have’, including our ‘military prowess’ against the Muslim extremists.

More serious, the President of the United States seems supine in the face of the gravest threats to international order in a generation.

Barack Obama boldly strides golf course fairways, while apparently washing his hands of the job the American people — and, by association, the civilised world — pay him for: to strive to lead us into the paths of righteousness.

To borrow P. G. Wodehouse’s phrase, however intelligent Obama may be, he resembles a spineless invertebrate.

Update: Speaking of scorn, here’s Jonah Goldberg yesterday (H/T to Jim Geraghty for the link).

This was always nonsense, but then again so much of the hype about Obama in the early days of his presidency was nonsensical. Still it does contribute to the poignancy of the moment. I’m referring specifically to the Islamic State and their celebration of slavery. MEMRI has excerpts of Facebook chats between British and French supporters of the group as they discuss the great news that you can buy Yazidi women as sex slaves.

[…]

It’s also worth noting that the president has done everything he can to claim that his domestic political opponents are engaged in a “war on women.” He won an election largely because he convinced enough women — and pliant journalists — to take this bilge seriously. Just this week the head of his party went on at great length to claim that the Republican governor of Wisconsin has been “giving women the back of his hand.”

Oh, and let us not forget, the president and his supporters work very hard to paint their domestic political opponents as religious extremists because some private businesses and religious groups don’t want to pay for procedures that violate their conscience.

Now compare this to the people who are celebrating the fact their faith allows them to enslave women.

Just think about it for a moment. The president surely knows about this. His administration surely knows about this. And yet, the president — this modern incarnation of Lincoln, protector of women and opponent of domestic religious extremism — defines his goal for the Islamic State as reducing it to a “manageable problem.” Does this mean that if the group renounces any designs on attacking the U.S. homeland (an impossibility given the tenets of their faith and ambition for a global caliphate) he will stand by as they continue to barter women as sex slaves and breeders? This is the same man who campaigned in Berlin as a “citizen of the world” and champion of global community.

Forgive me, but the term, “Lincolnesque” doesn’t immediately spring to mind.

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A deluge of public domain images

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Media — Tags: Advertising, Copyright, Photography — Nicholas @ 00:02

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick alerted me to a new source of old images:

Here’s some nice news. Kalev Leetaru has been liberating a ton of public domain images from books and putting them all on Flickr. He’s been going through Internet Archive scans of old, public domain books, isolating the images, and turning them into individual images. Because, while the books and images are all public domain, very few of the images have been separated from the books and released in a digital format.

There are all sorts of images in this stream, so you never know what you’ll find when you dive in. Here, for example is an image used in Canadian grocer January-June 1908:

Which, if you follow the link to the original publication, was isolated from this page of ads:

Or the rather impressive works of George White & Sons in London, Ontario:

This image appeared in Canadian Machinery and Manufacturing News (January-June 1913), illustrating a “Staff article” about the company:

A description of the works of an old established firm building threshing machinery, traction engines, etc. The plant has been gradually built up to its present size, the foundry being the latest addition. The company maintain two branches in the West and have agencies in all the principal cities and towns in the grain growing districts of Canada.

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QotD: Freedom of speech

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: Censorship, FreedomOfSpeech — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’ve always been in favor of freedom of expression, but lately I’ve become a free-speech absolutist. It takes all sorts to make a world and I’ve met a lot of them over the years, and I can stand pretty much anything anyone says about anything — until someone says to me, “You can’t say that.” At which point my inclination is to punch his lights out. I do this not just because I’m a violent psychopath with a hair-trigger temper, but to make the important point that in societies where you’re not free to speak your mind — to argue and debate — the only way to express disagreement is through violence.

Mark Steyn, “Yes, We Can (Say That)”, SteynOnline, 2014-02-08

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