🚀 go-pugleaf

In the referenced article lockhart@eecom.gatech.edu (John B. Lockhart) writes:

[you-can't-win story about stereos in FL deleted]

>In short:  You can't win.

Oh, yes you can.

>If they make it legal to buy alcohol on Sundays, they'll start taxing it to
>hell or require it only to be shipped in Georgia by sail barge or something.

1) The stereos were intruding on other people's right to peace and quiet.
   Beer, so long as it is not causing the consumer to make a nuisance or
   hazard of him/herself, doesn't intrude on anyone's rights; if this 
   happens, you arrest the person, not the beer.

2) If Georgia raises the liquor tax, folk will simply make runs to AL
   or TN or SC or NC where it's lower.... leading to

3) You can't tax imports for "personal consumption" into a state, the 
   Constitution forbids this; likewise, they can't mandate what form
   of shipping the stuff must take, only the ICC can do that.  

Now, it is permissible to outlaw the stuff altogether... but you wanna hear
screams of anguish, just try it.  Manuel Maloof would probably threaten 
Tom Murphy within an inch of his life, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The analogy is largely irrelevant.  The full-time residents of Clearwater
wanted their peace and quiet, and the government thereof undertook to see
that they got it.  I have no problem with this.  I do have a problem with
the state enforcing a law whose religiosity is fairly blatant sticking out
like a sore thumb in a otherwise fairly enlightened regulatory environment.
You mean to tell me I can go to Manuel's and get wasted out of my gourd and
have to find a legal and hopefully cheap way home on Sunday after the Braves
game, but I can't go up to the corner store, get a sixpack, bring it home,
and get totally plotzed in my own armchair in front of my own TV where I 
have little chance of being obnoxious to anyone but my roommate?  

Gimme a break.

Naw, better, gimme a beer. 

What, it's after midnight, and I can't have one?  Bacchus with a busted
wineskin, sometimes I loathe this state....

Glenn R. Stone (glenns@eas.gatech.edu)
speaking for his own quite sober self.