Slate
asks why
moonshine is against the law. The reasons given are distinctly
unsatisfying. The first is that the US government makes a lot of money
on distilled liquor taxes—$27 on every gallon of pure ethanol.
This isn’t that big a deal. Homebrewers and home vintners already
are allowed to make 100 (if single) or 200 gallons (per household) of
fermented alcohol tax-free each year, and so far as anyone can tell
federal taxes are not negatively impacted to any significant degree
($116.12 max per year for beer; $680 max per year for wine). Why not
allow us to distill the alcohol we’re already allowed to make?
Heck, don’t even remove the federal tax: allow us to distill the
stuff, but require us to pay taxes. Give me a downloadable PDF form and
a postage-paid envelope and I’d quite cheerfully mail in $13.50
per proof-gallon. Yes, some people wouldn’t comply: some people
are already not complying. I own my home; I have a full-time
job; losing those and my freedom are simply not worth a thousand dollars
in federal taxes.
The second reason given is that moonshine can be dangerous if
improperly made. This is highly disingenuous of the government: if
home distillation were legal, then stills sold to the home market
would be regulated so as not to contain any lead solder or similar
stuff. The health dangers are precisely the result of being
illegal, of moonshine being made in secret from stills manufactured in
hiding.
I should note that the federal alcohol tax was created by George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton in order to pay off our debt to
France after the Revolutionary War: proof that a tax once instituted
never goes away. I’m not even all that highly opposed to
retaining it; I would like the regulations surrounding alcohol
production to be loosened such that it’s easier to get into the
business. I would dearly love to start my own microbrewery:
there’s no practical reason why I couldn’t buy a $4,000
half-barrel brewery and make one keg of beer per day; I could then
sell that beer for $50-$60, paying $3.50 in taxes and about $30 in
materials and energy, realising a profit of roughly $25/keg. After
about six months I could purchase another half-barrel brewery and make
one barrel a day; after another three months I could expand to two
barrels a day; six months to a year after that I would have the
capital to rent premises in an industrial park and start a proper
brewery. There’s no practical reason I cannot do that; instead,
due to the regulations surrounding brewing I need to get together
$300,000–500,000 in capital. This is rather more difficult than
getting together $4,000.
This ties in to a lot of stuff: in general, going into business in
this country is very difficult and expensive due to massive
regulation, licensing, zoning and so forth. The marginal cost of
complying with a new regulation is negligible for an existing
corporation, but a steep barrier to entry for a new business; thus
existing corporations support an awful lot of regulation and licensing
as it costs them next to nothing and prevents competition. Our entire
system is geared around huge corporations, not around individuals.
You see the same thing with health care, where if one works for a
large corporation one has excellent, cheap health insurance; if one
works for a mom-and-pop operation one probably has nothing, or
poor-quality, expensive health insurance at best.
Anyway, there’s no reason for home distillation to be illegal.
I would dearly love to distill (if nothing else, it gives me something
to do with disappointing batches of beer); I am willing to pay taxes
on it. Please, change the law and let me distill!