Drinking in the Age of Social Distancing
LeBron tweeted this week that he needs a wine-drinking partner. Apparently, he's running out of them.
First, he faced a backlash when he mentioned that he lets his sons (ages 14 and 11) have a small glass of wine at dinner. And then the Kung Flu eliminated his Chinese drinking opportunities, furthering his physical, spiritual, and emotional suffering. And now Los Angeles and Cleveland are subject to shelter-in-place orders.
What's a guy to do? Maybe he could have a glass of wine with a friend while video-conferencing each other. Russ Roberts at Econtalk recommends this with a cup of coffee. He says it actually helps quite a bit.
I realize it's not ideal, but everyone needs to improvise during these unusual times. A bar owner in Syracuse is going to start a beer truck, just like the old time ice cream trucks. He expects to start rolling next week.
I'm stunned. It's a beautiful thing, showing the market adapting to swift and radical changes. I'm just stunned the fascist liquor laws permit it. New York isn't terrible when it comes to liquor laws, but I don't think it's a free-for-all, either. I'm under the impression that New York liquor restrictions are average (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, incidentally, are supposedly the worst). A rolling bar, reminiscent of GKC's Flying Inn, would not be permitted in Michigan, whose laws are pretty bad but probably not in the Nazi top ten.
This beer truck highlights the need for fewer laws. Laws are ham-handed. The free market is nimble. Society, culture, nature . . . they're all nimble: constantly changing. We need an economy that matches it. The top-down economy of legislative control, with one actor at the top making the rules, isn't nimble. The bottom-up economy of millions of actors is.
