The Year of Regulatory Reform: To-Go Alcohol and the Panic of Elites
There is perhaps no greater case that behavior-controlling regulations are unnecessary than the quick and uneventful repeal of bans on open containers of alcohol.
On the list of regulations repealed during the pandemic that should never be brought back, none has been so popularly celebrated as various state and local walkbacks of bans on alcohol delivery.
Early in the pandemic, as states shuttered businesses and public venues, service industries were hit particularly hard. Restaurants, at least, were able to still function, albeit at a greatly reduced capacity, by offering pick-up service.
But bans on open containers of alcohol meant they were missing out on revenue on what, for most restauarants, earns their greatest profit.
The moral panic over what citizens allowed to openly carry alcohol would do extended into some states initial response to the pandemic, ultimately making things worse.
Pennsylvania closed its state-run liquor agency, leaving its residents with no place to buy distilled spirits. This forced consumers over the borders and into neighboring states, so flooding demand that liquor stores had to close temporarily.
Aside from being an example of how one state can foist the consequences of its poor policy decisions on its neighbors, the fallout of Pennsylvania restricting access to liquor shows how foolhearty attempts to modify behavior are. If people crave a product, they will go to great lengths to obtain it.
Knowing this, states shouldn’t craft policy that forces people to behaviors, such as traveling out of their communities during a pandemic, that carry potentially greater risks than the product it has restricted access to out of misplaced concern for “the public good.”
Fortunately, most states chose not to follow Pennsylvania and the handwringing nay-sayers who, early in the pandemic, worried that access to alcohol would lead a lot of frustrated people trapped in their houses to abuse the substance.
Rather, most states chose to work with their business communities and rolled back restrictions on open containers of alcohol, allowing not only restaurants to sell mixed drinks to their customers but allowing alcohol-delivery services to expand, too. In the first case, this helped many struggling businesses by allowing them to sell a product that was both highly desirable to consumers and for which they could charge more. In the second case, alcohol delivery services not only offered convenience but safety: rather than mingle in stores and risk spreading the coronavirus, customers could place an order online and have a delivery driver leave it on their doorstep, no interaction required.
In total, “over thirty states have temporarily allowed to-go and delivery alcohol during the pandemic, and states like Ohio and Iowa have already made these reforms permanent.”
And regulatory rollbacks of alcohol delivery laws have been just as widespread. A few states have even made their loosened restrictions permanent:
(Graphic: https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/explainer17.pdf)
The question that now remains is, once the pandemic is over, will these services remain legal? Or will nanny-state regulators, convinced the American public can’t be trusted to manage itself, ban open containers of alcohol once more?
Unless you’re a panicky proponent of “common good” regulations, you probably won’t be surprised that following these rollbacks America didn’t experience a rash of car accidents caused by people, open containers of alcohol littered on the seats beside them, crashing into trees and buildings.
And even if it had, drunk driving is still a crime, as is any destruction of life or property that results from the inexcusable decision to get behind the wheel of a car with impaired judgment. The availability of alcohol, which can be purchased from a store and opened in a car even when regulations against doing so are in place, is not the significant factor here: poor decision-making by irresponsible individuals is. Shockingly, the law is often no impediment to the determined. Pennsylvanians flooding liquor stores in New Jersey and Virginia, despite travel restrictions, show that clearly enough.
But the fact remains: for the most part, the adults of America have proven they can make responsible choices. Access to alcohol in less regulated situations doesn’t immedieately trigger something in most adults’ brains that turns them into hard-partying co-eds.
For some reasons, regulators seem to think, absent their intervention, adults can’t manage themselves. And that forces those who think this Big Brother approach to government is patently absurd into the equally absurd position of disproving this belief by simply acting responsibly, like teenagers who prove their trustworthiness to their parents by taking the car out for the first time and returning it unscratched and before curfew.
And even couching a defense of permanent deregulation in these terms normalizes the idea that this relationship is somehow appropriate.
But the government officials responsible for writing regulation aren’t meant to be our parents. Their job is not to manage citizens’ welfare, particularly when doing so comes at the expense of citizens having the right to determine for themselves what their welfare looks like and what personal choices best secure it.
When regulators pass resrictions designed to short-circuit and effectively outlaw what they’ve deemed destructive behaviors, they’re revealing the contempt they have for the average citizen, whose lifestyle they clearly don't approve of and wish to influence and who they believe will be self-destrucitve without the paternalistic hand of morally-motivated bureaucrats.
Limited government and systems of democratic representation that appoint legislators as representatives of the people’s will are not compatible with this rather pessimistic view of human nature.
It evokes de Tocqueville’s view of how government uses soft despotism to cover “the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”
Regulation like bans on open containers of alcohol, enacted ostensibly to protect the public good do this. And they have the same effect on freedom of choice that de Tocqueville described in Book II of Democracy in America: the will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
This hyperbole is perhaps a tad dramatic, but government’s fear that citizens would be sucked into alcoholic depression if it rolled back restrictions on open carry-laws certainly demonstrates it thinks of the people as woollen-brained sheep that need its guidance in order to function.
So, yes, bans on open carry of alcohol should be permanently repealed, not just because they’re convenient, not just because the American citizenry has proven it can responsibly manage a world in which alcohol is more freely available, but because a government that foundationally exists to serve the interests of the people and protect their freedom has no business treating them like helpless children who need close monitoring.