Rubber, Buns, and Liquor

The Wall Street Journal has an article today (subscription required) about the Washington State initiative to deregulate its liquor stores. The measure would privatize the state run liquor stores and enable grocery stores to sell liquor, just like they do to great effect in Cali. A Portland area news station has more, reporting that, if passed, the state would end up shedding 900 workers due to the privatization. I haven't yet been able to find out if the tax is still sky-high, but the price is bound to go down due to competition, even if it's still there.

This is great news, so long as you're not a neo-prohibitionist. When I lived in Seattle, liquor was pretty hard to access, especially if you lived downtown. Being government-run, the stores had ridiculous hours. If the idea was to prevent people from drinking too much, it backfired, as you would just stock up on a ton to make sure you didn't run out. Virginia was the same way; I would end up driving to Maryland at ten o'clock at night because the government run stores would shut down. So much for preventing driving.

I've heard (but am too lazy to look up) that one of the reasons for so much control is to encourage consumption of beer and wine, as Washington has an abundance of local breweries and wineries. As a brewer myself, I appreciate the variety and supply sources it brings, but I can't help but think that micro-distilleries are the next wave. When I was in Kentucky a few months ago, the bourbon aisle of the liquor store was packed with local labels that all held their slots in the minds of whiskey takers.

Fed Soc on Property vs. Policy

Last November at the Federalist Society's annual lawyer conference its intellectual property practice group held a panel on whether IP should be treated as a property right or regulatory policy. Peter Menell and Richard Epstein have duked it out in Cato and elsewhere over the validity of intellectual property rights, which this panel sort of takes as a given.

The video speaks for itself, though I think Epstein's response to Bell at 46 minutes in says a lot. He justifies any exceptions to the patent and copyright system with social welfare, and is more concerned with free speech restraints on copyright than he is on property rights on patent law, since it's unlikely that a free user of patented technology will use it except as a free rider. I think this treatment of these exceptions is at the core of the property/regulatory distinction: does the rule restrict what you carve out (property right)?

This rests on positive/negative language, which can be a matter of semantics, but I think it can have real consequences in the debate. It's easy to see how, when IP is caked in the language of property rights as opposed to regulatory policy, a strong supporter of property rights may forget that IP rights involve a confiscation of other, more established common law property in the name of economic efficiency. And for conservative policy, which generally wants to strengthen property rights while scaling back the administrative state, semantics do matter.