Last year, Sen. Howard Lee (D-Orange) helped push through a bill to study North Carolina’s alcohol laws and regulations, with a particular eye towards our outdated, state-run Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) system of government stores retailing hard liquor. Local ABC boards jealously guard their monopolies and have long worked the legislative process to forestall any talk of privatization.
Apparently they succeeded again. The study commission that Lee helped to authorize is supposed to report its findings this week. It won’t, as most of its members have yet even to be selected. The panel will go out of operation on Saturday, not that it was ever in operation, and Sen. Lee won’t be around in the General Assembly to put the issue back on the agenda. He lost a bid for reelection in November.
This is a sorry state of affairs, to say the least. Privatization of ABC stores would generated hundreds of millions of dollars, at least, in one-time revenues from the sale to private vendors, and would have brought on to the tax rolls retail properties across North Carolina. I think an equally important selling point is the simple fact that our government should never have been in the ABC business to begin with. Its goal of “controlling” alcohol consumption was in inevitable conflict with the consumers’ interest in a variety of good, reasonably priced liquors. Moreover, I don’t like the idea of government, on behalf of its citizens, hawking alcoholic beverages, the consumption of which many of those citizens think is abhorrent (you’ve heard this argument before, regarding a state-run lottery, where it also valid).
We have a confusing array of alcohol-control laws, most of them designed to involve government either in the promotion or the suppression of liquor. They are incoherent, cost millions to enforce, and thrust government coercion squarely into a sphere of individual choice and privacy where it has no legitimate place. Lee and other lawmakers obviously recognized the need for change here, especially now when state and local revenue tanks have been running dry, but a combination of bad timing, listless leadership, and effective county-by-county lobbying by the ABC cartel subverted the study commission.
North Carolina must still sort out its alcohol-control policies. All we have done these past few months is kick the can, or bottle as the case may be, down the road a ways.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.