{"id":43894,"date":"2018-06-23T01:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-06-23T05:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43894"},"modified":"2018-06-22T21:43:09","modified_gmt":"2018-06-23T01:43:09","slug":"qotd-the-protectionist-two-step-alberta-craft-beer-variant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/06\/23\/qotd-the-protectionist-two-step-alberta-craft-beer-variant\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The protectionist two-step, Alberta craft-beer variant"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Economic protectionism has two classic rationales. Sometimes, as in the case of Alberta\u2019s clumsy attempt at an interprovincial tariff on craft beer, it is undertaken in the name of defending small, emerging \u201cinfant industries\u201d that a government wishes to give time to establish themselves in its territory. And sometimes, as in the case of Canadian dairy supply management, it is done to defend \u201cstrategic\u201d industries that have existed forever and that allegedly create an irreplaceable quantity of employment and profits.<\/p>\n<p>Give yourself a gold star if you spotted that these canonical pretexts for trade barriers are contradictory. The inherent promise of protection for \u201cinfant industries\u201d is that they will grow up and leave the nest. But, oops: by the time they reach adulthood, they may have become too \u201cstrategic\u201d to expose to market forces. Heads, the favoured firms win; tails, the consumer loses.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, on the level of fine detail, the arguments for trade barriers are manifold and complicated. (If you get into a quarrel about dairy, and take the free-trade side, you will find them being changed by your interlocutor every 30 seconds.) Alberta\u2019s program for supporting small brewers has an unclear, touchy-feely small-is-beautiful justification. By design, the tariff applies only to businesses that have no intention of attaining industrial scale. It\u2019s right there in the term \u201ccraft brewing,\u201d isn\u2019t it? Whatever the esthetic merits of craft beer, this is surely the deliberate encouragement of what the urbane left likes to calls \u201cprecarious\u201d jobs that could be flung into disarray by a bad season, a shift in fashions, or a supply problem.<\/p>\n<p>And, also, it\u2019s illegal.<\/p>\n<p>Colby Cosh, <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalpost.com\/opinion\/a-court-finds-that-albertas-shady-craft-beer-tariff-was-disguised-just-a-bit-too-thinly\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;A court refuses to swallow Alberta&#8217;s thinly disguised craft-beer tariff&#8221;, <em>National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2018-06-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Economic protectionism has two classic rationales. Sometimes, as in the case of Alberta\u2019s clumsy attempt at an interprovincial tariff on craft beer, it is undertaken in the name of defending small, emerging \u201cinfant industries\u201d that a government wishes to give time to establish themselves in its territory. And sometimes, as in the case of Canadian [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,25,41],"tags":[542,210,320,266,1185],"class_list":["post-43894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-economics","category-quotations","tag-alberta","tag-beer","tag-freetrade","tag-protectionism","tag-tariffs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bpY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43896,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894\/revisions\/43896"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}