Shutdown means no new craft beers from craft brewers. Carrie Antlfinger & Todd Richmond, AP via Chron.com
Mike Brenner is trying to open a craft brewery in Milwaukee by December. His application to include a tasting room is now on hold, as are his plans to file paperwork for four labels over the next few weeks. He expects to lose about $8,000 for every month his opening is delayed. "My dream, this is six years in the making, is to open this brewery," Brenner said. "I've been working so hard, and I find all these great investors. And now I can't get started because people are fighting over this or that in Washington. ... This is something people don't mess around with. Even in a bad economy, people drink beer." The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, or TTB, is a little-known arm of the Treasury Department. The agency will continue to process taxes from existing permit holders, but applications for anything new are in limbo
So, let's get this straight. We have a branch of the Federal Government who has among it's responsibilities offering permits for labels and bottle sizes. (The story goes on to say that a company cannot get a permit for an existing beer to be bottled in 22oz bottles instead of the 12oz ones.)
Is this really something the Federal Government should be worried about? Or is it just another example of excessive, heavy-handed regulation that doesn't promote business or safety, but generates revenue for the Fed's and ensures that they get their cut ahead of time?
An examination of one chron.commenters "defense" in the comments speaks volumes:
UseYerNoodle 10:12 AM on October 9, 2013
It sounds that way to a lot of people who have no clue what the food industry is like when regulation is inadequate.
So, according to UseYerNoodle, calls for removing this regulation are akin to calls to a return to conditions found in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I'm sorry, but if your defense centers on a logical fallacy it's not a defense at all. If Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then slippery-slope arguments are the last refuge of the Statist.
This just goes to show that the biggest fear of large government types in this shutdown is that a large amount of people come to realize how little they need all of this government in their lives.
