The CARE Act: Competition in Alcohol Reduction Effort

While the “commerce clause” of the United States Constitution limits Congress to passing laws involving interstate commerce, lawmakers have long taken an expansive view of what constitutes interstate commerce believing it empowers them to regulate such things as the medical care you receive in your home town to the wheat you grow in your backyard for your own family. But they do know where to draw the line:

Regulating actual interstate commerce.

And so a bill making its way through the House of Representatives would address the federal government’s outrageous intrusion into interstate commerce by returning those powers to the individual states when it comes to the distribution of alcoholic beverages.

Called the “Comprehensive Alcohol Regulatory Effectiveness Act” or “CARE,” the legislation would coincidentally protect the powerful state middlemen who sell alcoholic beverages and are often the beneficiaries of the complicated and monopolistic multi-tiered distribution systems created to keep out competitors. However, that is not why the members of the National Beer Wholesalers Association and the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America vigorously support the bill.

They support it because it ensures the effective collection of taxes.

In fact, they feel so strongly about their role in “ensuring effective state and federal tax collection” that they even helped write the bill for Congress.  (Hey, if they aren’t going to read them they certainly aren’t going to write them.)

Also, they are against taxes.

But it’s about more than collecting taxes.  State wholesalers also warn of widespread bedlam and drunkenness should we continue to allow the makers of out-of-state alcohol the ability to compete with them pointing out their role in “promoting temperance,” much in the way automobile manufacturers “promote walking” and Harry Reid  “promotes extemporaneous speaking.”

In related news, states and municipalities across the country are loosening the regulation of alcohol so more people will buy more booze and they can collect more taxes.

Looks like those wholesalers are really going to have their hands full!

J.