Brewing in South Korea I was reading the Economist and thought I'd post an example of how Government Regulations (which in theory are supposed to be there to somehow 'serve' the Citizen) have destroyed Beer that tastes good in Korea. Some of the millions of regulations include: 1. All brewers have to have enough capacity to brew well over 1million litres at a time (oh, I'm sure Hite had no part in conjuring that monstrosity into existence). 2. If brewers dare to deliver their own beer they get the hell taxed out of them (maybe the Hostess drivers work in Korea too Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) 3. Malt, hops and yeast are subject to low import duties but attempt to add anything else to your brew and it's deemed an "agricultural import" and a threat to the nation’s farmers. What's the tax like? Get this: Over 500%! An example would be oats. You're not going to see much oat beer in Korea. 4. Oh, and you'll need to a State qualification for a wholesale licence. Yes, you're probably too dense to make beer, you know, as a brewmaster - let the big boys in the government do the thinking for you. 5. For 'safety' of the Citizen, each and every vat must have a government placed meter - inspected by a government employee. Because, you know, you can't be trusted and must be a con ... unlike someone working in the government. Oh, and big shock, no free-market for beer in South Korea and all their beer tastes like poo..... actually piss would be closer to the truth. But they do have beer. I mean, if one were to grow up only drinking shit Hite beer, one could hardly fault such a person for thinking it's 'normal good beer'. You know, kind of like our healthcare, public schools, roads, and etc... (NOTE: Apparently North Korea makes a better beer compared to the South, if you're Paul Krugman you'd probably then jump to the correlation we should all join the Communist Party. Yes, it's possible to produce a product that's pretty decent without any market feedback. It simply doesn't happen often. It may be Dear Leader IS the market and demands a good beer - no one really knows. But, in a free society the money is your vote and that's how we decide what is good and what sucks). Just something to think about. The inevitable mess all bureaucratic agencies / "Federal Service Providers" make of things.
So such regulations destroy beer that tastes good. Let's see if that's really the case. San Diego has been voted the #1 beer city in the country by several organizations (Men's journal, the Brewer's association) and consistently places in the top 10 of polls throughout the US. So they must not have any of these laws, or the evil Government Regulations would have destroyed Beer that tasted good in San Diego. Let's see: >2. If brewers dare to deliver their own beer they get the hell taxed out of them (maybe the Hostess drivers work in Korea too) In San Diego brewers can't deliver their own beer AT ALL. Wow, worse than South Korea! >4. Oh, and you'll need to a State qualification for a wholesale licence. Yes, you're probably too dense to make beer, you know, as a brewmaster - let the big boys in the government do the thinking for you. In San Diego it's even worse. You need state approval AND a business license AND a federal TTB qualification. Yes, they assume San Diego brewers are too dense to make beer - let the big boys in the government do the thinking for you. >5. For 'safety' of the Citizen, each and every vat must have a government placed meter - inspected by a government employee. Because, you know, you can't be >trusted and must be a con ... unlike someone working in the government. In San Diego, for the 'safety' of each Citizen, each and every fermentor must have a government placed capacity marking - approved by a government employee. Because, you know, you can't be trusted and must be a con ... unlike someone working in the government. But wait! That's not all. If you discharge a lot of organics into the sewers you have to keep government records so the government can come and fine you if too much completely natural sugars go down the drain, because the State wants control of your wastes. If you come in to fill a growler, it must by law have the legal name of the brewery on it; it is illegal to fill a blank growler, because the government thinks that you're too stupid to know what you bought. If you have a tasting room you can't serve food, because the government wants to crush, I mean regulate, the restaurants differently. So here we have San Diego, where the government is trying even harder to destroy good beer. If your logic held any water we'd have worse beer than South Korea.
No, SD is trying less hard. If they were "trying harder" they'd have a 500% tax on all of the items used in the beer making processes that weren't hops, wheat and barely (actually, no one in government is 'trying to destroy beer' it's just a natural outcome of their inadvertent actions - although Hite is surely trying to squash competition) AND I didn't see the 1 million liter capacity for SD beer makers. Of the 5 I listed (and I'm sure there are thousands of other regulations a brew-master being a business owner must adhere to) those two alone would have the greatest effect on someone wanting to open up a microbrewery. As a matter of fact, the person complaining was a microbrewer owner trying to keep open his shop in Seoul. It is true that microbreweries and alternative breweries are not able to meet the regulations and simply don't do business in South Korea. That's not in contention. It's not like you can dump 'organics' into the rivers in Seoul. It's not possible to open a business in Seoul without multiple licences. Imagine if we were to add these two rules/regulations to SD beer makers. Only let's make the tax 5000% on any 'agricultural products' not wheat, barely or hops and a minimum of a 100 million liter capacity. Now imagine that nice microbrew you referred to, the one that came in #1 - under these 'regulations' that brewery simply never existed. The brewmaster just never bothered to open a brewery. Lets say the top 5 did likewise and so #6 becomes #1. You may be referring to #6 as we speak. As a matter of fact, I'm 100% you ARE referring to something as #1 that most certainly would NOT be #1 in a true free-market. Imagine everyone and their uncle could make brew. Think of all the small brewers out there for 'sale'/trade. Maybe the #1 beer you think of as #1 wouldn't even make the list of the top 100 in such a free-market environment. It's just you don't see it because it never existed. Much like South Koreans actually think Hite tastes... well, pretty good. And, relatively speaking, North Korean beer (the one the State sanctions) tastes better. Do YOU think all of these regulations encourage entrepreneurship? If not, why is it, do you think, we have them? If so, how so? Because our entire world is wrapped in these sorts of regulations. Everything from shoe leather thickness to your kids selling lemonaid on your front lawn. And what's horrid, and the whole reason I bring up this example, is that because of all these regulation and licences, for most people the hurdles are just too high. It's already a bit risky trying to open up a business (outside of internet businesses) and all the regulations and taxes put-off a large number of would be entrepreneurs. All those products don't exist. All those services don't exist. All those jobs for laborers don't exist. This means there's higher competition for the jobs that do exist. The ones that do exist are usually working for very calculating, penny-pinching shrewd businessmen like the Koch or Walmart families. Thus, the workers then try to fight against them by Unionizing and raising minimum wages. Sadly, in the real world, the gains made are washed away through inflation within a year but the higher prices remain and must be paid for by the people who didn't get a job because they weren't worth the price of their labor - which artificially priced them out of the labor market. When minimum wages raise, for the poorest life becomes that much harder. They end in a cycle of generational welfare. We are going to continue this cycle and things will get worse. Just like the bad tasting South Korean beer - it's an inadvertent outcome of the system itself. Oh, there's beer to drink, it just tastes like piss. We became a wealthy nation because of having a free-market. Which fostered can-do attitude in the culture as people tried and were successful at starting businesses. Due to the millions of taxes and regulations - and worse, we don't even have control over our currency of labor, we are now becoming a poorer nation - - the fact is, most Americans have given up on the free-market. They don't really know what it is. Most people don't see the regulations and so they blame the free market not realizing - it's them. Their choices. It's just that their choices aren't really free. Sure, you can buy beer ... and you can think it's #1. But that's not really the case.
Germany has many regulations regarding beer, and it's awesome. It's important to regulate this since amateur brewing can lead to blindness or sickness.
Some of the best beers in the world have traditionally come from Bavaria...where they have been brewed according to strict regulations for centuries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot
You must be referring to the Reinheitsgebot! (Germans love you if you know all about this Law Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!. I almost exclusively drink German beer. I like to drink micro-brews and I support micro-brews by buying them when I'm out having a drink (I will arrange to meet a microbrewery if possible) and I buy their beer by the case when I'm there. At least one case a month. It's just I can't drink these beers regularly. Here's an interesting fact about Reinheitsgebot, it had to be amended. The regulation was too restrictive (beers could only contain water, barley and hops). In a sense, this was a marketing ploy. By passing this Law (proposed literally about 500 years ago) this town was able to say to their consumers the beer you are buying is beer. The penalty wasn't harsh either - the locals took your beer and 'emptied it out' (yeah, I bet). In today's day and age a private company could do the job of this law by certifying beer for you. You could only buy beers that were certified "organic" as an example. I suppose what I'm getting at is, yes, sure, 500 years ago this Law made good sense (marketingwise too). But, we're not living 500 years ago. We have iPhones and can communicate with one anther in real time nearly for free with video. We can do things differently. AND, I think, if we are to continue to progress as a species - we will have to. Yeah, 5000 years ago maybe humans 'needed' to believe in Gods. We moved past that. Maybe 500 years ago we 'needed' purity laws. We can move past that. And IMO we have to. We have to move past a State. Actually, we kind of did with the advent of the USA. Passports didn't exist. The government didn't bother 99% of 'American Citizens'. Two steps forward one step back it seems.
Sorry, missed your post (see comment above Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!). I'll add that I'm sure Reinheitsgebot was a marketing ploy (I mean, there was no 'Germany' then). The Provisional German Beer Law (from WIKI) allows constituent components prohibited in the Reinheitsgebot, such as yeast, wheat malt and cane sugar, but which no longer allows unmalted barley. As I said, I almost only drink German beer - and even if there were no Provisional German Beer Law (which is almost a point of pride and probably not 'needed' per say) I'd still drink German beer. They make good beer and their laws, much like those in SD, probably do restrict some brewmasters but not enough that Germans notice. There's nothing wrong with following a 'Code of Conduct' and offering a legal contract with your costumers that you will make beer under the following conditions: X, Y, Z. What I'm saying is we will need to progress socially past having the State as we now understand it. It's an economic necessity if we want to continue to enjoy better living conditions. We took that step back, how about now we go for those two forward Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I agree that we need to progress beyond the State as we know it...but not by eliminating it. What is required is more regulation over the process of establishing leadership. By that I mean requiring citizens to pass an aptitude test on constitutional law to earn voting rights. There are prerequisites for almost everything in life *except* choosing our lawmakers. This is the most disastrous of all omissions.
I think the additives have to be removed by law before bottling. Yeast was unidentified and unknown as an ingredient when the reinheitsgobot was established. Another very positive regulation would be to require a certain percentage of potassium and magnesium in the water used for brewing...considering the importance of these minerals to human health.
That's true in San Diego as well. Two state and one federal. They can. Homebrewing is alive and well here. They just can't sell it commercially. The #1 beer I can think of is a beer that they sell ~200 cases of a year, so I don't buy the argument "if only there were more smaller brewers I would get better beer." I have access to literally thousands of homebrew beers via our local club and none of them are as good. But who knows? One of these days I may find one. (One; it's almost a guarantee you'll never get it again if it's a homebrew.) I was in South Korea last month. And the people there treat Hite (and Cass) much like we treat Bud here. It's what most people get cause it's easy to get. The people who are into beer think it's crap. Some of them do, by setting standards for safety, quality and labeling that make people more willing to buy their products. Some do not. I'm all for keeping the ones that work and getting rid of the ones that don't. In fact, we recently had a big stink when the state health department tried to demand an increased level of industrial design in a brewery that was trying to open. The brewery pushed back. In response the state went around and shut down a bunch of other breweries. It got all the way to a state representative, who talked to the federal agency responsible for regulating such things. The feds said "sorry, states can't regulate that." As a result the brewery opened and that requirement is now officially gone. And here's something that will really bake your noodle. That agency that helped out brewers? That tore down that extra layer of bureaucracy so that it was easier to open breweries in San Diego without government interference? It was the Alcohol and Tobacco Trade Tax and Trade Bureau, a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury. Public health. Public awareness. Taxation purposes. Liability tracking purposes. Yes, they can be high. And the people who want to make beer anyway homebrew. And they win awards, and get lots of acclaim. And the ones that really want to do the work and open their own breweries. I have three friends of mine who have gone that route; none are geniuses or millionaires. Well, like I mentioned, we have similar laws here, some even more onerous. And yet we have some of the best beer in the world here. I was recently at Lost Abbey (small local brewery) and got to talking to two people there. They were on a beer tasting tour from Germany that was hitting 18 of the local breweries over the course of a week. That would never have happened 20 years ago. Just because you have doesn't mean the rest of the country has. It's alive and well in the beer community here, for example. Are you going to tell people that the beer they like isn't #1 because you don't like it? Interesting.
Well I'm pro-microbreweries, but that only because I'm a wine and girl-drinks drinker and think beers would be better of with more variety.
I have a question: Do you think that when public institutions take over a social space, that the private institutions are crowded out of that space? I notice that many children now, unlike when I was a child, are not being taught how to read prior to entering public school. It's as if, somehow, many parents all across the nation have come to think education is to be done in government funded institutions and thus it's no longer their parental responsibility to educate their own children. I only give this as an example. However, if you look at Communist countries, what you'll find is an almost desolate wasteland where once private institutions flourished. For mathematical reasons Communism isn't economical, but it's worse than just that. Plenty of island nations are economically poor. Yet these nations still have private institution (even if it's just at the tribal level). I propose Communism as an evidence that the invasion of the State into private space acts to eradicate the very social foundations that make society - leaving these societies barren of the very institutions they need to be socially meaningful and successful. Just something I think about and I'd argue it's worth giving it some thought. My response to the question below, would bare this in mind and probably only makes sense once you appreciate this aspect together with my personal opinion that Kant's notion of "Anarchy" (being a violence free society) is still worth aspiring towards. So? Q: Why do we have regulations? A: Public health. Public awareness. Taxation purposes. Liability tracking purposes. All of these things can be done privately. Through free voluntary interaction. Yes, they can also be done through a public institution - but, that's not what we should do. We need to try NOT to allow ourselves to rely on the State. Not only is the likelihood the service will be overpriced and of poor quality (with no market price mechanism) it undermines society itself. (A) Public Health: In this case, this comes down to wanting good healthy food. At present the FDA calls up the factory, letting them know they'll be by on Saturday. The factory cleans up for the inspection. Tick Tick Tick. Done FDA approved. Why not do this privately instead? Company XoX will only lend it's stamp of approval to those food manufactures that have meet their standard health requires as can be read on their website. XoX guarantee to come by and check randomly - as stimulated in their public contract. The food maker has an incentive to get their certification as then people will trust their food and buy more of it. Company XoX has an incentive to make sure they really are doing their job because if not the competition will rat them out and take market share. We end up at the same place - even better and cheaper. Only instead of initiating force by using the State, we instead rely on voluntarism. And, if you've ever seen the chicken factories and slaughter houses, you'll soon realize the FDA allows us to eat bleached chicken shit. And the FDA can and has come down hard on farmers selling raw milk. It's ridiculous. (B) Public awareness: I think private companies do a pretty good job of making people aware of their products. And people are good at detecting cheap shit (example: Zune) quite quickly even when there's a multimillion dollar ad campaign trying to push it up hill. (C) Taxation There's many different types of taxation. I'd give one example of how direct taxation could be bypassed. Suppose if you wanted to buy at a grocery store or ride in a taxi - you needed a Gold Card. This card was only given once you donated a certain percentage towards a public park. No donation, no Gold card, no groceries, no taxi. NOTE: Tax on gasoline to support roads is a LOT different than income tax on labor. You don't own the gasoline. You pay the tax when you purchase the fuel. Labor OTOH you own. It makes no sense to pay tax on something you already own. The only argument I've heard around this is if we think of working as a privilege. I can't see how working is a privilege that you should pay to do. As a matter of fact, it's the opposite, we sell our labor into the free-market and are paid. The business owner may pay a tax, but not the laborer. There's really no reason I can think of as to why the business owner would pay a tax either. What IS this tax for anyway? Suppose it was to support the Health of the person whose labor is being purchased. It'd be better to paid a higher wage or offer a healthcare into the contract. (D) Liability tracking This is easily enough offered by a private company as a service and is already something you can purchase via a cheap chip and GPS. What kind of society do we want to live in is a question I ask. One based on violence or one free from violence?
I haven't given up on the free-market. But you just listed tons of examples of why we shouldn't have a free market and should instead have a regulated market. I'm pretty sure free-market capitalism is becoming a dirty phrase in the USA. Which is really scary when you stop and think about it. To me it's a sign society itself is breaking down. The free-market is us, afterall. When we no longer trust one another, and come to totally rely on the State, well, that's pretty much the end of this little experiment we tried in the USA. Which, TBH, if History is anything to go by, is the way all great societies go. We're not immune to the social forces that act to shape history anymore than were the Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, Romans, Germans, Japanese, Spanish or English. We're replacing the private social pillars that lay as the foundation of our society....little bit by little bit by State run ones. While each peace itself may be small, in aggregate there's massive erosion already. Already many children can't read before entering school - and some after graduating and being State qualified with a High School Diploma. Those that can read have great difficulties comprehending what they're reading and most can't critically evaluate the information they're reading. One study showed that adults would argue against their own opinion just 5 minutes earlier if tricked into thinking they had held the opposite opinion. All very telling.... I wonder, how long before the poorly run and mismanaged public institutions of the State can no longer bare the weight of the social problems they themselves create? About 5 million child and adults inadvertently starved to death in North Korea due to mismanaged resources - they're still going strong. I think a child dies needlessly about 3 times an hour in the USA.... we're still going strong. I'm guessing sometime around 2030ish. But, who knows.
