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Comment by piltdownman | Hacker News Reader

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It's a balancing act. We limit <some thing> if the damage to society caused by it is greater than <some amount>. With the caveat that getting those limits put in place can be complicated, given the influence of money on political will.

- We limit drinking by minors

- We limit smoking to outdoor areas

- We limit driving over certain speeds

We limit many, many things that an individual can do based on how they impact society as a whole. We even limit some things an individual can do that have no impact on society (but I disagree with this completely).

That is how societies work.

Society always has and continues to limit access to certain things at certain times in certain places for certain groups of people for reasons that vary. We call it censorship/restrictions when we don’t like it. We call it reasonable control when we do.

a true liberalist would argue that you can sell your kids, as long as they agreed to it

The state I grew up in prohibited distilled spirits from being sold at non-State run stores.

Oregon is that way.

Groceries stores can only sell beer, wine, and malts. If you want vodka, schnapps, and other hard liquors, you gotta go to a dedicated state-run liquor store.

Most of them are pretty small, too, so if you want something uncommon, it can be hard to find. Luckily the OLCC runs a website where you can search for specific items and it will tell you which stores (if any) carry it.

I do wish we could just get a BevMo though.

Which is a methanol related health and safety measure grandfathered in as a holdover from the Volstead Act. All first world control have significant hazard analysis and supply chain integrity measures for food and drink.

Most Nordic countries also have a state monopoly on alcohol, and these are as first-world as it gets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systembolaget

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinmonopolet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BAsdrekkas%C3%B8la_Land...

I'm not sure that's the entirely the case, given that, when I was a kid, you couldn't buy non-distilled beverages at the grocery store either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...

Temperance related measures post-Volstead - an insidious loophole to appease the Bible Belt whereby liquour is specifically exempted from the federal oversight of interstate commerce.

I believe there's some relation between this and federal highway funding being tied to a minimum drinking age of 21, but I may be misremembering some half-read magazine article.

I believe it’s drinking age and breath limit thresholds thanks to MADD.

Tangential—methanol poisoning from an improper brewing or distilling process is largely, maybe completely, a myth. Where toxicity events have occurred they are almost always deliberate or accidental adulteration, e.g. fortifying moonshine with industrially "denatured" (deliberately poisoned) alcohol. There has been a lot of sloppy journalism in such cases that doesn't question the myth, as well as Prohibition-era propaganda that lives on to this day.

Great Reddit discussion about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/firewater/comments/9p1fwe/methanol_...

TIL. That said, I hadn't anticipated much rational in Prohibition rationale. The thread did support my suspicion that grappa hangovers are their own special category of hell though!

Many states cap ABV of spirits.

And many European countries can't sell e.g. Everclear. The key bit of my statement was 'arbitrarily low'.

We used to have to travel to the next state over to buy Everclear (you know, for the _good_ parties) and bring it back.

Riiight.

So it is censorship that we don't sell alcohol in schools?

It is censorship that we prohibit open beverages in automobiles and airplane cockpits?

Yikes. I expect this kind of "all regulations bad!!" nonsense on other social media, but sadly, starting to find it here too.

I'm often reminded of the rationalist liturgy:

A well-armed society is a polite society.

IIRC from Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The just so story is when the govt's monopoly on violence is devolved to individuals, people will police themselves.

We now know empirically that a well-armed society is certainly not polite.

Indeed, that is a nice sentiment, but not borne out by the actual data.

It's more like being armed makes not all, but far too many people, think they can be as much of an ass as they like at any time. It works fine, right up to the moment it doesn't and they get put down; but they never think of that in advance, so it doesn't stop that subset of the population being asses (or just shooting up the place), and the rest of us having to live life watching our sixes.

There's a reason that most civilized societies moved past it.

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