One of the great benefits of living in a federal system with 50 sovereign states is that, compared to a normal country, we're 50 times as likely to create really silly laws.
I recently captured these photos of a Marathon service station in west central Ohio selling “beer and wine at state minimum prices.”
Now I’m sorry, but that is just funny. Of all the evils to protect people from, the Ohio legislature, in their infinite wisdom, has seen fit to protect the citizens of the Buckeye State from getting too much of a bargain on beer.
God forbid. Maybe they should outlaw rainbows and cute, fuzzy bunnies while they're at it.
Let me make a clarifying observation: The Ohio legislature is not protecting people from cheap beer. (Natural Light, for instance, is still legal.) They are protecting people from paying cheap prices for beer.
That’s right, the state of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, forces people to pay more for MGD than for Busch. I’d love to have been there during the committee hearings.
“Esteemed members of the legislature, please put down your tasters. All in favor of making Ohioans pay a buck less for Busch, please signify by stumbling over a lobbyist.”
I’d have taken more photos, but I was stopped by the store clerk. She said the owner of the store, watching on closed-circuit television, was upset. Why? He was, she said – and this is best part – worried that I might be from a competitor store. Huh? What’s a competitor going to do with that information? Undercut his prices??
The law, Ohio Administrative Code 4301:1-1-72, that dictates minimum prices on beer has a preamble explaining its purpose. One aim is to prevent sales that would “improperly stimulate purchase and consumption” of beer.
Oh, okay. That makes sense. So if a “good” beer, like Budweiser Select, were sold for $3.49 per six-pack of 16-ounce cans, then people would go crazy and drink too much. But it’s okay to charge that for Milwaukee’s Best Ice, since, presumably, the taste of “the Beast” serves as its own limit on consumption.
Another purpose of the law is to “eliminate discriminatory sales practices that threaten the survival of wholesale distributors”. That’s a good point. As we all know, a lack of state-minimum prices on beer has led to the tragic loss of beer distribution in most of the rest of the United States.
Now, some of you may think that the real purpose of the law is to eliminate competition on the basis of price. Not so. The law says that part of its purpose is to “preserve orderly competition”.
If we could only put the high-minded geniuses of the Ohio legislature in charge of college sports, we might get more orderly competition in football – for instance, a rule that mandates all teams named “Ohio State Buckeyes” start national championship games with an automatic extra 30 points. That way we could prevent “disorderly” results such as Ohio State losing in back-to-back years.
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