Coyote Blog

A while back I challenged anyone who doubted the burden of regulation to go try to get  a California liquor license.  Today, John Stossel echos the same theme in this post.

"The authority's 26-page "on-premises" application requires owners' detailed financial information, prior employment experience, proof of citizenship and floor-plan details, and it also entails fingerprinting and background investigations. It asks whether music will be played (and if so, what kind) and whether dancing is planned"¦ Such was the complexity of the application process that "I visited the office so many times, it got to the point where the guards stopped asking me for identification," Steve Chahalis said.

I can concur with this experience. In every state I have gotten licenses, I have encountered a bureaucracy that has pretty much forgotten even why it exists or what it is trying to achieve. The Department of Labor can be a pain in the butt, but it at least it has a mission (protect workers from depredations by "the man"), even if that mission is sometimes misguided. But it is impossible to even figure out what problem state liquor boards are trying to protect us from with some of the detailed questionnaires and picayune attention to detailed responses**.

Yet the Times and the bureaucrats have the nerve to blame the businesses: "Restaurant and bar owners are to blame for some of the delays" says the reporter, quoting a state bureaucrat who says: "Ninety percent of the applications are incomplete when submitted."

LOL. Let me give you one example. I had to cancel my entire application, on which I had spent over a year, resubmit a new application, and pay an additional $200 in fees all because on one form (out of scores) there was a typo that showed the address on "Lake Pire Rd" rather than "Lake Piru Rd."   So was this my fault, having a typo in thousands of words of application responses, or the fault of the state liquor board's for not just hand annotating the typo and moving on? If you told me that the main guiding principle of ABC operations was to find a way to reject and send back every single application for even the most trivial of reasons, I could not muster any evidence to disagree with you.

I always complete the applications myself, but I may finally give in on the next California application. In California, the state is full of consultants who will fly your application through the process. Anyone want to guess who these consultants are? If you guessed "retired government alcoholic beverage commission employees," you win. This is the retirement plan they have created for themselves -- make the process so onerous for individuals trying to navigate it that they are forced to use a retired ABC employee as a consultant, after which the process magically goes smoothly.
By the way, this is also another good example of how large corporations are benefited by regulation vs. smaller competitors.  TGIFridays, for example, has a whole department of people who just do liquor licenses.

**Postscript:  Part of the problem is that states are trying to protect us from Al Capone -- thus all the fingerprinting and background checks.  But that problem was solved with legalization.