Free the Hops

From reason.tv

Tomor­row, Alabama Sen­ate Bill No. 132 goes up for vote. Locals know it as the “Free the Hops” Bill, because of the non-profit grass­roots move­ment behind it. It’s a very big deal around here. A bill was intro­duced into both the House and the Sen­ate to raise the state alco­hol limit to 13.9%. The redun­dancy gives the sup­port­ers more chance to get their leg­is­la­tion passed, and is a fairly com­mon tac­tic. The House ver­sion passed last week, as did a sim­i­lar bill to update wine laws.

In gen­eral, I dis­like beer. I don’t drink it, mostly because of the taste.  I’m sure FTH sup­port­ers would sug­gest that maybe that’s because I live in Alabama and have never tasted good beer. Still, I have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in this leg­is­la­tion on the surface. Furthermore, I find it a bit aggra­vat­ing how well edu­cated the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion is about this piece of leg­is­la­tion, espe­cially in a city where our illus­tri­ous Mayor Lang­ford ignores real­ity and no one bats an eye. Many gen­er­ally don’t bother to inform them­selves on local issues, but every­one has heard of Free the Hops.

I really should pay more atten­tion, though.

Alabama is los­ing rev­enue due to the restric­tions on the free trade of alco­hol.  Brew­ing in Alabama is extremely dif­fi­cult to profit from due to anti­quated laws.  Tourism dol­lars are being lost. Allow­ing beers to be sold here that peo­ple have been buy­ing when they go to Geor­gia would obvi­ously help the local econ­omy.  My Father-in-law was men­tion­ing the other day that when­ever some­one leaves for Geor­gia or Ken­tucky, he sends some money for a few bot­tles of Madeira because it isn’t sold locally due to alco­hol con­tent.  And of course, he uses it for cook­ing. ( He prefers ouzo for seri­ous drinking.)

Free­dom, even in areas that hold lit­tle inter­est to me, is always worth pur­su­ing. Our alco­hol con­tent lim­its are really a  small scale ver­sion of Pro­hi­bi­tion, and that was really about leg­is­lat­ing moral­ity.  The argu­ments against loos­en­ing restric­tions on alco­hol con­tent usu­ally come down to pre­vent­ing drunk dri­ving and under­age drink­ing, which are cov­ered by exist­ing laws any­way.  The grass­roots cam­paign for the cause has been highly effec­tive, with a mas­sive viral mar­ket­ing and edu­ca­tion push. To see the pub­lic take inter­est in any­thing polit­i­cal is always encour­ag­ing, espe­cially when the pub­lic is push­ing for less gov­ern­ment involve­ment.  What can be learned from this cam­paign that can be car­ried over into more urgent issues?