Craft Beer and the Human Economy

Tom Philpott observes that not all alcohol regulations need necessarily be a bad thing:

It’s true that Carter’s move on behalf of home brewers helped push along the craft-brew revolution, as did the state-by-state unwinding of rules preventing the opening of brew pubs, which largely happened in the 1980s and ’90s. But in both cases, the regulations in question were clearly misguided in the first place—they were remnants of Prohibition, designed to keep people from drinking at all. I join my libertarian friends in opposing clearly misguided, archaic regulations.

But even archaic regulations have their place. The most famous beer regulation of all is Germany’s illustrious Reinheitsgebot, or Purity Law, which governed that country’s beer production from 1516 until a slightly more expansive version came into effect in 1993. The Reinheitsgebot decreed that products marketed as beer could contain only the following ingredients: water, malted barley and hops. (Yeast was originally omitted, because in the 16th century, the role of microbiota in the fermentation process wasn’t understood.)

Granted, the Reinheitsgebot was always problematic. It prevented German beer makers from engaging in the kind of experimentation that took place in Belgium, home of delightful fruit-flavored beers that would have run afoul of the purity law.

But it saved German drinkers from the truly bad beer that plagues most of the globe. A 2006BBC story listed additives typically found in corporate beer, none of which you’ll find in the stuff brewed in Germany: betaglucanase, ammonia caramel, rhoiso-alpha acids, sulphur dioxide, protease, amyloglucosidase, propylene glycol alginate, and silicone. Nor will German beers ever be dumbed down with cheap filler grains like corn and rice, which are part of the reason American brews like Bud and Miller taste so insipid.

Tom has written more about this here (where he links to an old Balloon Juice post of mine) and here (where I got that nifty graph up above…).

When we talk about regulation, I think it’s important to dissect the nature of the regulation itself. A regulation that simply requires beer to adhere to specific quality standards is pretty benign. Regulations that grant monopoly distribution rights, prohibit grocery stores from selling alcohol, and make it impossible for new entrants to make and/or sell their beer are harmful and stupid. Just saying regulation good! or regulation bad! won’t do. You have to explain why a regulation is useful, or why it causes harm.

Tom also comments on Yglesias’s piece on the union aspect of the big brewers versus the craft brewers. I think he misses the point Matt’s trying to make a bit. I don’t think Matt is cheering on the craft brewers because they don’t have unions. Rather he’s pointing out that unions are not necessarily an opposing force to big corporations, and supporting corporations just because they have a unionized labor force is not an inherently progressive thing to do. I would add to that point simply that small brewers tend to provide more options for workers in a more human, less industrialized setting. If workers at craft breweries wanted or needed to organize, more power to them.

Speaking of the “more human” aspect, I wrote yesterday at Forbes about something I’m tentatively calling the ‘Human Economy’. Here’s what I said:

Jobs are great, but welfare should be used to thwart the inherent economic uncertainty of a capitalistic, global society. People should not lose their insurance just because they’ve lost their job. Universal healthcare would go a long way toward allowing people to be more independent, more entrepreneurial, and less risk-averse in their private ambitions. I think that in the emerging service economy – with more and more people working outside of the normal constraints of office and industry jobs, as freelancers and contractors – this will become even more important. Far from discouraging work, the right kind of welfare can do just the opposite.

I’ll call it the Human Economy for lack of a better term, but I envision a world where the old status quo relationship between boss and worker is largely a thing of the past, where free markets and smart welfare programs and a green infrastructure combined with personal technology and peer-to-peer interactions create a truly vibrant, innovative economic future.