The Exponent - opinions


09-25-2003	Previous edition: 09-24-2003

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Keg tagging proves ineffective

Hooray for Bureaucracy! Keg tagging is in full effect starting on Saturday.

Every time consumers purchase a keg of alcoholic beverage in Indiana, a tag has to be filled out with information about the purchaser. Half of the tag is kept at the liquor store to serve as a record of keg purchasers, while the other half is affixed to the keg itself. The thinking is that if police officers are breaking up a party involving underage drinking and a keg is present, police will be able to apprehend the purchaser for supplying alcohol to minors. The keg tagging law is supposed to serve as a deterrent for underage drinking, say officials. But these same officials have apparently never taken a basic economics course or are naive. Or both.

Tagging kegs may do an excellent job at decreasing the sale of kegs when the alcohol purchase is intended for underage drinking, but it won't decrease the sale of alcohol. Especially when every other packaging in which alcohol is sold isn't tagged. Minors aren't going to stop drinking because kegs are tagged — their friends who purchase their alcohol will buy cases or hard liquor instead. Kegs and other forms of alcohol are substitute goods; making one kegs costly, monetarily or otherwise, will on shift the demand from kegs to other forms of alcohol. In fact, a dangerous unintended side effect caused by keg tagging may be the increase in consumption of homemade alcoholic punches intended for large groups, which — when mixed by students — tend to have a higher alcoholic content than your average light beer. This could actually lead to an increase in actual alcohol consumed by a party-going student.

What this law creates is bureaucracy for law-abiding citizens and liquor stores. Purchasers of kegs will have to be bothered with cumbersome paperwork, and liquor store employees will have to waste their time (and their employer's money) filling out paperwork for a program that will be ineffective in the aggregate. Yes, it may take only a minute or two to fill out the paperwork, but multiply that by the number of kegs sold, then multiply that by the wage of liquor store employee. Add in the lost sales from customers too impatient to wait for the person in front of them to fill out a tag, and you're looking at a large cost to the liquor store owners, which will almost certainly be passed along to the customers, one way or another.

The law won't work. Shame on the government for taxing its citizens for such an ineffective program that will only cost law-abiding citizens and liquor store owners in the end. Shame on the government for bowing to the special interests of well-meaning, but wholly ignorant modern-day prohibitionists who pushed for this program; a program that will succeed at nothing.

The Editorial Board is: Jason Tomcsi, Matt Poston, Tom McHenry, Yuri Victor, Michael Williams

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