The spectacle of an old man trying to look young inspires pity and revulsion. The same could be said of Pennsylvania's obsolete Liquor Control Board, which is engaged in the bureaucratic equivalent of a comb-over.
Two recent episodes have exposed the awkwardness of the LCB's efforts to seem as if it belongs anywhere within a century of 2010.
The first is the board's ill-conceived attempt to pretend it's part of - rather than an impediment to - Philadelphia's thriving restaurant scene.
The agency opened its first "wine boutique" this year inside Garces Trading Co., a Center City restaurant-market owned by celebrity chef Jose Garces. The odd public-private partnership allows Garces to operate a BYOB - saving the expense of a liquor license and the requisite insurance - while enjoying the extraordinary benefit of having the bottles in the same building. Patrons can buy wine at regular State Store prices and walk it into the café, which can even swap warm bottles for chilled ones.
A group of Center City restaurateurs - including owners of both BYOBs and liquor-licensed establishments - has responded with a richly deserved lawsuit against the Liquor Control Board, arguing that the deal gives Garces an unfair advantage. It's hard to see how a reasonable judge could find otherwise.
The Garces store is unique statewide, and the LCB is vague about plans for other such boutiques. Moreover, even if the agency opened five or 10 more in-café State Stores, they would still amount to a government-granted advantage for arbitrarily chosen businesses. That's the trouble with state control of a trade that so clearly belongs in the private sector.
The LCB revealed another botched cosmetic surgery recently when it test-launched new wine vending machines in two central Pennsylvania supermarkets.
The machines, which could be deployed more broadly later this summer, allow prospective connoisseurs to select bottles using an ATM-style touch screen. Buyers must then swipe a driver's license to prove they are of age, exhale into a Breathalyzer to prove they are not (yet) drunk, and pay with a debit or credit card. All of this is monitored remotely by an LCB employee, who peers at a video camera feed to make sure every oenophile matches his ID.
Make it through this Rube Goldberg process and - voilà! - you have just completed a transaction that, under normal circumstances, would require nothing but a few more supermarket shelves.
Only a hopelessly archaic bureaucracy could produce such a reinvention of the wheel - or, in this case, of supermarket Aisle 3. Maybe the futurists at the liquor agency will even figure out how to let us buy wine on this Internet thing we've been hearing about!
The current age of austerity has already had the accidental benefit of ending some of our most egregious government excesses. State after state, for example, has decided it can no longer afford to lock people up for a little marijuana. How long before Pennsylvania realizes it's run out of money and reasons to lock up all the booze?
