Stephen Edmonds, CC BY-SA 3.0 In Kansas City’s latest demonstration of regulatory abuse, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the City Council are introducing a sweeping Prohibition-style ban on thousands of single serve alcohol products across the city. The city council will consider the proposal on Tuesday, March 10.
The ban, championed by progressive hero Mayor Quinton Lucas, would outlaw a long list of products under 40 ounces, including:
- “Tall boys”
- All individual beer bottles
- All individual seltzers (i.e. Whiteclaws, High Noons)
- Ready-to-drink cocktails (i.e. Jack & Coke)
- Mini liquor bottles (aka “shooters” or “nips”)
- Buzzballs and similar malt beverages
- Mix-n-match 6 packs
- Mini bottles of wine
- And many more….
Prohibition has not worked historically and will not work this time, especially considering the geographic location of Kansas City. Fully half of the city’s metro area is in another state. When residents of Mayor Lucas’s Kansas City, Missouri can simply drive a mile across the border to Kansas City, Kansas to purchase the products they want, the primary effect of Lucas’s proposal will be driving businesses and dollars out of his city.
Like his Puritan predecessors from the 1920s, Mayor Lucas will surely fail at his goal in implementing this classic nanny-state regulation. Lucas claims the policy will reduce crime, since liquor stores tend to crop up in high-crime neighborhoods. But that logic is transparently unsound. Banning the ability of locals to buy alcohol in smaller containers would naturally force them to buy alcohol in larger containers instead (or, of course, get in the car to drive to Kansas and back – a recipe for more DUIs). Lucas ought to explain how incentivizing people to drink more, not less, would accomplish his vision of reducing crime. Moreover, when businesses and dollars inevitably flee Kansas City, Missouri for the freer shores of Kansas City, Kansas a few blocks down the road, the reduction in economic activity will only exacerbate crime issues, leaving residents poorer and more of them unemployed.
Bans and high taxes tend to push people into other cities and states to get the products they want. Take Massachusetts’ ban on flavored vaping and smoking products, enacted just a few years ago. The numbers are clear: Bostonians and other Massachusetts residents are simply driving north across the border to New Hampshire to get the flavored products they want, while also taking advantage of their northern neighbor’s 0% sales tax to make other purchases during the trip. Massachusetts loses more than just cigarette tax revenue as a result of their ban; they give up significant sales tax revenue, too. Meanwhile, there is no evidence that the ban has changed consumer preference to any degree.
Rather than try to intervene in the lives of its citizens even more than they already have, Mayor Lucas and the city council would do well to leave their people alone. If they are truly interested in addressing the quality of life of their residents, Lucas can start by reducing the crippling double-digit local sales tax rates – most of which is levied at the local level. Individuals and families need tax cuts and financial relief, not a silly government crackdown on Whiteclaws.
