People often think I am defending corporations when I make the point that it is usually the state that facilitates their dirty work. There is very little point in railing at corporations when they are using state-sanctioned means to suppress competition. Better to get rid of the unreal tools with which they insulate themselves from market evolution and the public’s glare. I often example those who engage military and police to evict indigenous people from assets they bought rights to from government. Here is a more easily digested example, and one involving something close to my heart.
The growth of small craft breweries in the US has been astounding. I became a beer connoisseur in the mid 1970’s and recall there then being under ten breweries in the entire USA. A decade later there were 110 and today there are 3,500.
So how has Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewer, responded to the growing popularity of quality beers? No amount of advertising can lure somebody back to Bud Light when they have tasted proper beer made by beer-loving brewers. Instead, they are manipulating an outdated and irrelevant Prohibition-era law to block the brewers of craft beers from distributing them to other sellers.
As they say in the coverage of this story by Rare, “…it’s clear that what Anheuser-Busch is doing… could not take place in a truly free market…Imagine what kind of craft creativity could be unleashed for all to enjoy if the government would simply get out of the beer industry’s way altogether!”
Imagine what creativity could emerge from the market if government stopped regulating all those things that we can manage better.
For the full story from Rare, click here
This is a fundamental point of my book The State Is Out Of Date – We Can Do It Better, which looks at the transformative power of freedom and the dangers that arise from its suppression.
My interview on living without a state