Tuesday, March 31, 2015

We live in the best of all possible worlds

Stay thirsty, my friends:
I will leave you with one note of optimism, from Mark Perry.  I went to college in the nadir (1980) of the American beer industry, where a small oligopoly of mediocre beer producers was protected by government legislation.  It was a classic example of how regulation drives monopoly, consolidation, and loss of choice.  With deregulation, the American beer industry has exploded.
beer1

3 comments:

  1. There's 5 in my immediate area (or 6 depending on how you want to count it, one of them just opened a bottling plant/another restaurant to go along with their main location). Not bad for a town with 130,000 people.

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  2. New York State has done a lot in the past 10 or 15 years to promote the wine industry, not just the big companies like Constellation Brands but also little family-run wineries. More recently the state has made it easier for family farms to obtain a brewery license, so we're seeing a lot of microbreweries start up. And now they're doing it for distilleries.

    Now is a great time to be an alcoholic!

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  3. Who are you kidding? You also went to college when 18 year olds could legally drink. You wouldn't have known what a good tasting beer was if it bit you.

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