At the request of a group of St. Johns business owners, the City Council voted 4-0 to ask the OLCC to restrict beer and wine sales in the St. Johns commercial district. Jack Bog and John Dunshee (author of the Just Some Poor Schmuck blog) are politely disagreeing about this; Mr. Dunshee calls the council's vote a display of "Big Mommy knows best," while Jack says that the council is simply trying to "run the drunken bums out of the neighborhood," something he believes Mr. Dunshee should support. [As Jack points out in the comments, he used the words "drunken bums" not to express his own opinion but to echo Mr. Dunshee's use of the word "bum" to describe the man who was shot to death last week downtown.)
I think they agree that a commercial area is unattractive and in fact scary to shoppers if people who are drunk on malt liquor or cheap wine are stumbling up and down the streets (no one seems bothered by the expensive drunks -- people who overimbibe the expensive '73 Bordeaux -- or the yuppified ones, maybe because it's impossible to stomach enough Campari in one sitting to get stonkered), but they disagree on the solution -- they may even disagree on whether the city should solve the problem. I read Jack to say that the city could reasonably cut off the supply of malt liquor and wine to reduce the number of public drunks. Mr. Dunshee is saying, I think, that people are responsible for what they buy and drink, and the city might pursue the drunks but should not stop the merchants from selling what their neighbors are willing to buy. I read their dialogue as a classic supply-side versus demand-side argument. Professor Bogdanski and the city council want to cut off the supply; Mr. Dunshee wants to discourage demand.
At least the city council is treating this as a quality-of-life question for the commercial area and the businesses, and not (contrary to Mr. Dunshee's view) as a sanctimonious mother-knows-best effort to protect the drinkers of malt liquor from their own excesses. But if the City should adopt the mother-knows-best approach to restricting drinking, I wish it would prohibit the offering of free wine at charity auctions, under the guise of protecting the credit ratings of the guests. Anatole France would delight in a city government that protected the rich, as well as the poor, from the evils of alcohol.