Last time I drank a cheap beer at the bar I was pretty confident that it was legal for me to do so. However, as of late, the city of Madison seems to believe that drinking — at any cost — is a privilege that only they have the divine right to control.
Hopefully we can all agree that we live in a capitalist country in which the principles of supply and demand are able to reign freely. But recent events have led me to believe that the city of Madison controls alcohol consumption not unlike a fascist dictator. As the perfect example, City Council President Mike Verveer recently announced his intentions to curb the sale of cheap beer at Kelley’s Market on West Washington Avenue for reasons that might make him more popular in the short run but will only shift the problem he is intending to fix.
Complaints of transients loitering, begging and drinking in the nearby Brittingham Park shelter have come to the attention of Mr. Verveer. And now, for all intents and purposes, he intends to halt the renewal of Kelley’s Market’s alcohol license, simply because they have decided to sell cheap beer. Mr. Verveer seems to think that limiting the sale of beer in one area of town is going to minimize the city’s problem of drunken transients. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
Limiting the availability of cheap alcohol in one area of town is going to do nothing more than entice transients to transfer their drinking habits to another part of town. The homeless are not going to decide that since their favorite spot to buy a beer has increased its prices that it’s time to skip town.
Madison has long used alcohol as the scapegoat for every problem a normal, mid-sized college city might have. It appears the city’s logic goes something like, “If we make alcohol more expensive downtown, students won’t drink. If we take away a cheap source of alcohol for the homeless, they will leave. If we blame all our crimes on alcohol, the public will excuse us.”
Wrong.
Alcohol, for better or worse, is a permanent fixture of our culture. It is always going to be available and will always be consumed in this city. The policies enacted and enforced by the Alcohol License Review Committee are nothing more than appeasements for the overly concerned. Madison’s true problems rest on its overwhelming ignorance of real social issues.
Instead of worrying about the transients’ drinking problems, why don’t we worry about the transients themselves? Madison’s homeless are coddled like nowhere else on earth. It is almost as though Madison has enacted a policy of institutionalized homelessness. I’m confused as to how a city can complain about drunken transients when they provide designated begging stations on State Street. I wonder what strict enforcement against panhandling might do for the city’s drunken homeless population?
I guess it’s too hard for the city to realize that the homeless are going to buy alcohol with the money they receive while begging at locations the city designates for them.
Madison has no right to infringe upon legal, capitalist businesses before they make intelligent attempts to fix the real problems at their core. Likewise, what right does any individual — City Council president or otherwise — have to target a business doing nothing more than competing in the free market? And unfortunately, it appears as though Mr. Verveer and his Prohibition era pals in City Hall will get their way, as Kelley’s and others have vowed to stop selling cheap four-packs as soon as their inventory runs out.
The city of Madison has a population of just under a quarter-million people and a relatively low crime rate for its size, yet the city and the ALRC seem to think that a mandate to curtail drinking will drastically reduce crime and turn Madison into Martha’s Vineyard. If we truly take a step back and look at what the city and the ALRC are attempting to do, we realize that the recent trend of policies is nothing more than an unwarranted band-aid for a larger problem. It will fix nothing in the long run.
Ben Patterson ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science.
