Did you hear that?

Another domino fell in the fight for open markets and individual freedom as Worcester County, Maryland opened its doors to the free market by closing the county-controlled liquor board that mandated all businesses had to buy from them. (You never hear of places going to the PA way do you?) While the county is still going to try and remain a wholesaler in competition with private businesses, those businesses are free to shop wherever they want.

This could be a good way to gauge if the PLCB would be competitive if faced with free market competition, although the PLCB, with a bloated management and office staff, isn't as efficient compared to the county.

So raise a glass of whatever beverage you enjoy, and wish the people of Worcester County the best as they join most of Maryland and 33 other states in using their freedom of choice. Maryland is right next door, so maybe this will rub off on the group of dunces we have in the Senate as they see how the majority of the country works just fine without any socialist intervention by unqualified cube rats in Harrisburg.

Remember: privatization is modernization! 

Just to remind you what the Senate is protecting you from...

Thanks to the gutless chumps in the state Senate who couldn't pass a privatization bill (because it would interfere with their campaign cash nom-noms), we don't have to worry about this happening in Pennsylvania!

"Total Wine and More is set to open its sixth Washington state location in Olympia on July 18. The 21,000-square-foot space will stock more than 8,000 wines, 3,000 spirits and 2,500 beers, including 1,500 Washington wines, 80 spirits distilled in Washington or Oregon and 550 beers from the Pacific Northwest region. The outpost will also feature a “Brewery District” beer-tasting bar and growler station, offering 12 rotating taps of local craft brews. Total Wine and More’s seventh Washington store is slated to open in Spokane later this year."

Just imagine if we had passed a similar privatization law in Pennsylvania (without the stupidly greedy tax increase Washingtonians got stuck with, of course). We'd be faced with greater choices, lower prices, more jobs, and diminished border bleed within a year. Thank God the Senate is a spineless special-interest pool that can't bring itself to be a body that reflects the will of the people!

What Rough Beast...

The Second Coming

W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Harrisburg to be born?

 

A twisted, disfigured privatization bill is limping toward the finish line in the Senate as I write this, at 1:30 AM on Saturday morning. I'm listening to the Democrats' last-ditch efforts as amendments are offered. Senator Teplitz is admitting that the PLCB is corrupt and stupid, but thinks it should be retained. I believe he undercuts his argument...but it's futile. He's speaking in favor of "The Ferlo Amendment." That's the Democrats' "modernization" scheme, which really stands for more of the same...only now open on Sundays (although Ferlo's amendment DID have better "package reform;" the Republicans have ludicrously made The Case Law even MORE complicated). 

 

This bill is ridiculous in its pointless compromise. If it passes, we will still be a laughingstock among civilized states. Unnecessarily arbitrary compromises stud it like chunks of coal in a pudding. This has become a coddling of Big Beer, and a crusade against Corbett. It will be decided on party lines, for reasons having very little to do with the merits of the bill.

 

And you know what? I'll take this Second Coming of private alcohol sales in the Commonwealth. Because once the wall is broken, it cannot be repaired. It can only be further torn down as people realize how stupid it was to begin with. The predictions of disaster will come to naught.

 

Ferlo's amendment was defeated, narrowly, with one Republican -- Greenleaf, of Montgomery County -- voting for it. The bill has been amended, with a vote of 27 Republicans in favor of the Pileggi amendment, an augury of success in the Appropriations Committee, after which it will return to the Senate for final passage and reconciliation with the House...which could be tricky. But another step goes forward; the slouching continues. The senators are calling it a night, and so am I.

 

Another hurdle overcome: privatization passes Law and Justice Committee

SB100 has passed out of the Senate Law and Justice Committee by a vote of 6-5. The squeaker came when Republican Senator Don White (41st District, Indiana County) voted NO. Full vote is here. Privatization is now available for consideration by the full Senate. The bill now moves on to the Appropriations Committee (my mistake), then to a Senate vote by Wednesday. It won't be easy.

But that officially means that option 1 on the poll up there to the right...is no longer a concern. Call your Senators today!

Money from privatization rolls in out in Washington

Just sent this to the members of the Pennsylvania Senate Law and Justice Committee:

To the honorable chairmen and members of the Senate Law and Justice Committee,

Greetings. I've watched all three of the hearings your committee has held on privatization of the current state monopoly on wholesale and retail sale of wine and spirits. One concern that seemed to come up time and again was that of consistency of revenue. You were presented with a baffling array of projected numbers: how much the Commonwealth would lose under privatization, how much it would gain, the amount various other states have lost or gained by privatizing.

One number that seemed to have escaped notice, however, is this one: $78 million. That's the increase in revenue from spirits sales that the Washington State government has seen in the year since they privatized their state-owned monopoly. If you're interested, the details are here.

(Please note that the $425 million figure in this article includes the $38 million the state made from the auction of retail licenses; the $78 million increase is taxes only.)

So if you're thinking about how privatization will affect revenue, and if that important consideration has an effect on your vote, please remember that privatization -- if done correctly -- can indeed increase revenue. We don't need to speculate. Washington has provided us with a real world experiment, and the outcome shows the benefits of privatization.

Thank you, and I hope you will consider all angles of this issue. I have high hopes of a good outcome from your deliberations, as this is a very important issue for me.

Lew Bryson

Yeah, I know: Washington raised the fees/taxes/grab on liquor, and that may be some of the nut. Trust me: they know that too. But even with higher taxes/fees/blood money, the prices in Washington -- as you'll see if you read the piece linked above -- are still close to what they were before. Without the increases? Who knows how low they might have gone, but the fact is, what kept them down was competition.

"Main Street Does It Better"

The National Federation of Independent Businesses did the following video about liquor privatization. It doesn't need much comment. This is all stuff that we see all the time. We know this. Send it to your Senator, and ask them why they want Pennsylvania to continue to lose this tax revenue, and why they want to continue to send Pennsylvanians out of state.

Tell your Senator everything the PLCB's doing!

I copied this from a Facebook post; I don't think the original poster will mind. The idea is that while the Senators fiddle and diddle and talk about "modernizing" the PLCB instead of privatizing it -- privatization that the majority of Pennsylvanians continue to support -- we should remind the Senate what a great job the PLCB is doing. So...get on the phone, send an email, and let your Senator know that the PLCB deserves credit for all the things they're doing!

• Tell them that you really thought the wine kiosks were innovative 
• that you thought the date-rape ads were on target 
• that your mother liked the vodka 
• that you didn't mind that your wine sat in an non-air conditioned trailer in the summer 
• that you think the PLCB didn't have anything better to spend the now $35 million+ in computer cost overruns on 
• that bringing back the CEO under investigation for graft is a great idea 
• that TableLeaf is the best thing since the PLCB spent over $4 million to rename Wine and Spirits to Fine Wine and Good Spirits
• that you're impressed with the string of record annual sales figures (and the bookkeeping skills needed to explain why the net assets of the PLCB are negative)
• that thy have an amazing jobs program going that has more employees now with 601 stores then there were with 692 stores in 2000
• that it's great that the PLCB spend more on advertising than on education
• that they're saving money as the 3rd largest purchaser of wine in the world by not bothering to have a trained sommelier on staff?
• that smile training should be mandatory for all state workers (especially when you can keep it "all in the family")
• that you really appreciate having 90 stores less than there were in 2000 so there wouldn't be a liquor store on every corner. 

Pretty amazing when you add it all up, isn't it? Remember: call your senator today...and then call them again next week. And the following week. And so on, till you get a good reason why they'd rather vote against what the citizens want than for it.

What's Going On

As you know, the House passed HB790. It was clearly an historic day, the first time a liquor store privatization bill has ever passed out of a chamber of the Legislature. Let me say that again. This is the first time a liquor privatization bill has ever been passed in the Pennsylvania Legislature.

And that's great, but now it has to pass in the Senate, and the Republicans there are even more resistant to voting with their party, with their party's governor, and with their party's age-old direction on government functions. Why? Lots of reasons, but it's going to take time, it's going to take work, it's going to take YOU talking to your senator (and other Republican senators), because to pass, a privatization bill that's not watered down to a "modernization" bill will need all but one Republican senator.

Public opinion is energized, newspaper editorials are falling in favor of chopping the system apart, and even the New Jersey papers are getting into the act: they know damned well that privatization in Pennsylvania will mean a loss of business for NJ liquor stores. We need to keep the pressure on, we need to keep talking about this, and we need to be in the senator's mailboxes...and maybe in their offices.

I'm going to be gone for a bit, and the blog will be silent again. I've got another blog going for a project this Sunday -- Session Beer Day, a nationwide, low-key celebration of tasty, low-alcohol craft beers, more about it here -- and then I'm going to Scotland to tour distilleries for a book I'm writing. When I get back, we really need to talk about getting a visit to Harrisburg organized, to show the senators that while we don't have yellow t-shirts like the union, we're still serious about privatization of this fossilized relic of a "system" that should never have existed. And maybe we need to revisit the idea of a large group of people publicly, simultaneously, going over to NJ or Delaware, buying a bottle of booze, and openly bringing it back to PA: if the Senate won't give us privatization, we'll have to go and take it.

Get busy. Stay pumped. And talk to your Senators!

Next month: beer law forum at Yards Brewing

If you're in the Philly metro area, you ought to join us at Yards Brewing on November 8, at 7 PM for another Beer Laws Forum, put on by Philly Beer Scene. Here's the scoop:

Join us for the 2nd of our Beer Laws Forums. Last February we had an open forum discussing the different beer laws affecting Pennsylvania. Senator Chuck McIlhinney who writes our Beer Laws column and Lew Bryson answered questions and Tom Kehoe of Yards moderated.
For this forum, Tom, Lew and the Senator have all generously agreed to once again sit on the panel, and this time will be joined by Bill Covaleski, of Victory Brewing Co who will be representing the Brewers of Pennsylvania, and Mike Gretz Sr. of Gretz Beer Distributors, who will be representing things from the wholesalers point of view. The forum is open to the public and we will do our best to answer everyone's questions.
The event will be held at the Yards Brewing Co. tasting room and the bar will be open for the event. 

You should come, because this is a chance to find out what's really going on with liquor law in the Keystone State. We are in an activist phase in the legislature with regards to the Liquor Code; things ARE changing...but not the case law, and not its even more ridiculous corollary, the "only 2 sixpacks law" that says if you want to buy more than 192 oz. of beer to go at a bar...you have to buy two sixers, step outside, then come back in and buy more. 

I want at least one of you to ask the Senator what the chances are of killing or even significantly changing the case law by this time next year. He'll say it's not going to happen this year...then I'll do my bit and ask him "Why not?" Then, most importantly, I'll ask Tom, Bill, and Mike what their position is on the case law. 

We all want sixpack sales. We'd really like beer sales of any volume at grocery stores (and convenience stores and gas stations and drugstores; you know, like they do in other states?), although we know that's not likely. But why can't we get sixpack sales? You need to ask the Senator, then go home and ask your legislator the same question. And don't settle for "No." Ask why. 

And while you're at Yards, do what I do: drink plenty of Brawler. It's my debating beer of choice.

Senator Pippy: entire liquor code "in play"

Just a quick note: check out this story quoting Sen. John Pippy, chair of the Senate liquor control committee. (Thanks to Purnell Jones for the link.) Here's the money shot:

House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said he does not want to see his bill to privatize liquor sales potentially bogged down by becoming an omnibus liquor reform measure. While he expects to honor Turzai’s desire to deal with privatization in a separate bill, Republican John Pippy, chairman of the Senate committee that vets liquor legislation, said other issues related to updating Pennsylvania liquor laws will be on the table, albeit on a different track.  “All those issues are going to be in play anyways,” Pippy said. “As the chairman of the [Senate] Law and Justice Committee I’ve said we are going to look at everything. I think we need to modernize Pennsylvania liquor law.”

That's right, folks. As the late Senator Donatucci told me after the beer registration raid hearings last spring, we're moving into an activist phase concerning liquor legislation in PA. Things are going to happen. So we gotta push. I've written to my legislators and Governor Corbett (and I'll be talking to my state rep later this week about privatization, at his invitation): get on the line and do likewise!