HIT & RUN BLOG

A nurse at the Insite safe injection clinic in Vancouver, B.C., holds a basket of clean supplies. Credit: Darryl Dyck/ZUMA Press/NewscomThe United States attorney with jurisdiction over Vermont announced this week that a proposal to introduce supervised injection facilities (SIFs) in the state would be illegal under federal law and would "encourage and normalize heroin use."

Vermont legislators are considering supervised injection facilities due to the state's massive increase in opioid overdose deaths. In November, a group of local law enforcement and medical professionals in Chittenden County, Vermont, concluded an eight-month study of SIFs by announcing that the state legislature should legalize them.

Such facilities have operated for years in Canada, Australia, many cities in Europe, and Iran. They allow heroin users a safe place to inject, clean needles, and access to social workers and medical staff.

The list of SIF proponents in Vermont includes Patricia Fisher, a physician at the University of Vermont Medical Center; University of Vermont Police Chief Lianne Tuomey; Chittenden County State's Attorney Sarah George; and Grace Keller, the head of a harm reduction facility called Howard Center.

But others in Vermont's law enforcement community appear unready to lower the death toll. "By permitting SIFs, is Vermont at risk of condoning heroin use and giving illegal drug use the state's stamp of approval?" asked Tom Anderson, the state's commissioner of public safety, in November.

And now a federal prosecutor has waded into what should be a state and local debate. On Wednesday, the office of U.S. Attorney Christina E. Nolan released a statement claiming that SIFs "are counterproductive and dangerous as a matter of policy." Here's more:

[T]he proposed government-sanctioned sites would encourage and normalize heroin use, thereby increasing demand for opiates and, by extension, risk of overdose and overdose deaths. Opiate users, moreover, all-to-often believe they are purchasing heroin when, in fact, they are purchasing its common substitute, fentanyl, ingestion of which gives rise to greatly enhanced dangers of overdose and fatality. Introduction of fentanyl to SIFs would create additional public health risks, not only for the users, but for SIF staff members who might come in contact with that highly potent substance.

What's really interesting about this statement is that not one part of it is true. A 2014 literature review of 75 SIF studies concluded that such facilities are "efficacious in attracting the most marginalized [drug users], promoting safer injection conditions, enhancing access to primary health care, and reducing the overdose frequency." The literature review also found no evidence that SIFs "increase drug injecting, drug trafficking or crime in the surrounding environments."

As to whether it's better to get people off heroin than to let them shoot up safely: That's the wrong question to ask. Of course it's better to not be addicted to heroin. But there's a huge disparity between the availability of evidence-based treatment options and the number of people who want to manage their opioid addiction. Regardless of whether we resolve that asymmetry, basic human decency should compel us to make life less awful for people who risk dying every time they get high.

As Steven Chapman recently put it: "Even the most incorrigible opioid users are not beyond help. But dead ones are, and there are more of those every day."

Cpenler/DreamstimeAmericans' trust in their national government hovers around historic lows according to a Pew Research Center poll this month. The poll reports that "only 18 percent of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right 'just about always' (3 percent) or 'most of the time' (15 percent)." This is down from a post–September 11 high of 60 percent in 2001. In modern polling, public trust in the federal government was at its zenith at 77 percent, in 1964.

Americans are not just more skeptical of their government; their trust in their fellow citizens has also been declining. Since 1972, the General Social Survey has been asking Americans if "most people could be trusted." In 1984, 47 percent answered yes. In 2014, the last year for which data is available, interpersonal trust had fallen to 31 percent—the lowest level so far.

Our World in Data

What is going on? Perhaps President Donald Trump is partially at fault. Now why would I suggest that possibility? That brings me the results of intriguing new study, "Do Lies Erode Trust?," just published in the International Economic Review. In that study, two economists from the University of California, Merced, conduct a couple of experiments to see how lying affects the way people treat each other. Without going into great detail, the researchers first have a set of subjects play a deception game such that the first player gets a bigger payoff by lying if the second player chooses to trust the offer being made is the best deal for both.

In the next round, all the first players are sent home while each of the second players now matched with a different player. The second players are given general information on how much lying took place in the first game, and some are told whether they had personally been lied to in the first game. In the first game, 60 percent of first players told the truth to the second players. In the new game, both senders and returners are given an initial stake of $4. If the sender gives his $4 to a returner, the amounts are combined with an added $4 amounting to a total of $12. The returner then has the option of returning $7 to the sender and keeping $5 for himself (win-win) or returning only $2 while paying a $2 fine, thus netting $8 for himself (lose-win).

It turns out that players who had been lied to in the first game were much less trusting or trustworthy in the second game. Only 32 percent of the lied-to players would trust sending their $4 stake to the second players for possible gains, whereas 49 percent of told-the-truth players did. In addition, only 39 percent of lied-to returners were trustworthy (choosing to return $7), compared with 61 percent of told-the-truth returners, a difference of over 22 percentage points.

Consequently, the researchers find that "being on the receiving end of a lie (vs. a truth) leads to an erosion of trust, even in interactions with those who have nothing to do with the initial deception." They further speculate, "Given the central role that trust is known to play in promoting economic interchange and growth, this conclusion suggests that social institutions that deter dishonesty and promote norms of truthfulness are of potential economic value." In fact, the invaluable Our World in Data site shows a very strong relationship between social trust and per capita income. Economic research has found that trust is the egg that hatches into the chicken of economic development and prosperity.

So what about Trump? It is true that social trust has been declining in the United States for a while now. That being said, there is no doubt that our president is a shameless and enthusiastic liar. As of November 14, the Washington Post fact checker has tabulated 1,628 false or misleading claims made by the president over the preceding 298 days: an average of 5.5 fibs per day. If he can keep the pace up, he'll have told more than 2,000 whoppers before the end of his first year in office. And his dishonesty may be having an effect on his plunging public approval ratings. Earlier this week, the Monmouth University Poll reported that the president's "current job rating stands at a net negative 32 percent approve and 56 percent disapprove." This is the lowest so far for that poll.

Surely it's not too much of a stretch to conclude that if lies do erode trust, that the torrent of lies coming from our president may be especially corrosive.

My colleagues over at Reason TV cogently explain that people who have the misfortune to live in low-trust societies tend paradoxically to want more, not less government. They note that "it turns out that government may be growing not in spite of our lack of confidence in it, but because of our lack of confidence in it. This self-defeating spiral will only get worse if the United States fails to stem its slide toward being a low-trust country." See "Why Libertarians Should Want More Trust in Government" below:

With Republican tax reform almost a sure thing, the nation is poised to experience the most sweeping and significant changes to the tax code since the late 1980s. But are those changes—including lower corporate and individual rates, reductions in some longstanding deductions, and almost certainly trillions of dollars in new national debt—good from a libertarian perspective.

Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the Cato Institute, likes most of what he sees on the corporate side of reform. But when it comes to individual tax policy, he tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, "It's basically reassembling deck chairs on a really messy and horribly complex system."

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• ERIN SCHAFF/UPI/NewscomSen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said that he will in fact vote for the Senate's tax reform legislation. The senator had previously said he'd vote no over concerns the bill did not include a generous enough Child Tax Credit.

• Paul Manafort to be released from house arrest, but still has a curfew.

• The feds are cracking down on Instagram models.

• In a win for liberty, Miami gets rid of its red light cameras.

• Trump judicial nominee biffs basic legal questions in a confirmation hearing. Popehat says to hate the nominator, love the nominee.

TeavanaThis week a federal jury declined to award any damages to Adlynn and Robert Harte, the Leawood, Kansas, couple whose home was raided in 2012 based on a field tests that supposedly identified wet tea leaves in their trash as marijuana. The verdict is not very surprising, since the only claim the Hartes were allowed to pursue required them to show that Johnson County sheriff's deputies lied about the results of the tests. There are other plausible explanations for the comically inept operation that led to an early-morning SWAT invasion and an increasingly desperate two-and-a-half-hour search for a nonexistent marijuana grow.

As 10th Circuit Judge Carlos Lucero noted in the July 25 appeals court ruling that allowed the Hartes' lawsuit to proceed, the field test the deputies say they used on the leaves is notoriously unreliable. "One study," Lucero wrote, "found a 70% false positive rate using this field test, with positive results obtained from substances including vanilla, peppermint, ginger, eucalyptus, cinnamon leaf, basil, thyme, lemon grass, lavender, organic oregano, organic spearmint, organic clove, patchouli, ginseng, a strip of newspaper, and even air." The label on the test kit warns that its results "are only presumptive in nature" and should be confirmed by laboratory analysis.

The deputies' failure to heed that warning could be seen as evidence that they lied about the field tests. But it is also consistent with a pattern of false urgency, ignorance, and sloppiness. The initial impetus for the raid was a tip from Sgt. James Wingo of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, who saw Robert Harte visit a garden supply store in Kansas City with his two kids on August 9, 2011. Harte was planning to grow vegetables with his son as a science project, but to Wingo he looked like a cannabis kingpin. Wingo sat on the supposedly incriminating information that Harte had bought indoor gardening supplies for seven months before sharing it with the Johnson County Sheriff's Office, just in time for "Operation Constant Gardener." That publicity stunt, conceived by Wingo, required pot raids on April 20, the unofficial stoner holiday. Hence the false urgency.

As for the ignorance, Deputy Mark Burns confessed that he had never seen loose tea before but thought, based on his training and experience, that it looked like marijuana leaves. A lab technician consulted after the raid disagreed, saying the leaves didn't "appear to be marijuana" to the unaided eye and didn't "look anything like marijuana leaves or stems" under a microscope. Burns himself did not deem the leaves suspicious the first time he pulled them out of the Hartes' garbage. But he thought they were worth testing when he returned a week later, 10 days before the raids demanded by Operation Constant Gardener. Sheriff Frank Denning, who authorized the search of the Hartes' home without laboratory confirmation of the field test results, claimed he had never heard such tests could generate false positives, despite four decades in law enforcement and despite the warning on the label. Maybe Burns and Denning were both lying, but it is at least as easy to believe they were simply uninformed, incompetent, and careless.

"The defendants in this case caused an unjustified governmental intrusion into the Hartes' home based on nothing more than junk science, an incompetent investigation, and a publicity stunt," Lucero concluded. "There was no probable cause at any step of the investigation. Not at the garden shop, not at the gathering of the tea leaves, and certainly not at the analytical stage when the officers willfully ignored directions to submit any presumed results to a laboratory for analysis. Full stop."

The Hartes plan to appeal the verdict against them. But even if they never win a dime in compensation for the trauma and embarrassment inflicted by the bumbling drug warriors of Johnson County, they have made redress easier for future victims of police abuse by lobbying for reform of their state's public records law, and they have shined a light on the pseudoscience, phony expertise, and reckless showboating that pass for professionalism among cops who dream up vanity projects like Operation Constant Gardener.

'Cuba and the Camerman,' NetflixTelevision critic (and Cuba expert) Glenn Garvin views Jon Alpert's Cuba and the Cameraman on Netflix and is appalled by Alpert's lengthy history of superficial documentary work:

Even when Alpert inadvertently asks a question that might lead Castro into swampy territory, there's never any follow up. When Alpert queries the Maximum Leader, during a visit to the United Nations, how he feels about a group of anti-Castro demonstrators across the street from his hotel, Castro blandly salutes the nobility of dissent. "I admire those who are against, because they are active," he says. "They move around. They work." That virtually begs for a question about Cuban dissidents like Armando Valladares or Ana Rodriguez, then both nearing the end of their second decades in hellhole prisons for defying the regime. None is forthcoming.

Watching even a few minutes of Cuba and the Cameraman comes at the cost of a fearful number of brain cells. (And if you sit through the scene in which Alpert's young daughter asks Castro to sign a note to get her out of school, make sure there's an ICU located nearby.) Yet, however unintentionally, Alpert has introduced some revealing moments into his film.

Tea / DreamstimeSome good news from the National Labor Relations Board: They've reversed a ruling that could have held large chains responsible for the labor practices of its franchises.

Prior to 2015, big corporations (like McDonald's, in this case) would be held responsible as employers during labor disputes or for labor law violations involving franchised locations, but only to the extent that they exercised corporate control over the decisions. If an individual franchise operator was violating labor law on his or her own—by paying less than the local minimum wage, for example—he or she would be the one held accountable, not corporate HQ.

A 2015 decision altered these terms, holding McDonald's potentially responsible for labor complaints filed by employees at individual franchises. McDonald's insisted that it played no corporate role in the hiring and pay decisions that had prompted the complaints.

In a party-line vote yesterday, the board overturned that decision and restored the previous understanding of the relationship between corporations and franchises or contractors.

Overturning this decision doesn't mean that franchised businesses cannot be held accountable for labor violations. It merely means that the punishment for misconduct falls where the misconduct happens.

When the ruling was originally announced in 2015, I speculated that this change was being pushed partly because business franchises tend to operate on fairly thin profit margins and there was a limit to how much money could be wrung out of an individual restaurant or convenience store. A big corporation offered a bigger payday, even if that corporation wasn't responsible for these violations.

Some labor observers also suggested that this was meant to make it easier for unions to organize workers. Why go through the effort of all these piecemeal franchise fights when you can consolidate it all in one big go at the corporation? And again, much more could be demanded of McDonald's, the corporation, than some guy who owns five individual restaurants in Iowa.

I wondered in 2015 whether the decision could lead to greater automation of the fast food industry. McDonald's is indeed introducing more self-service kiosks in stores to serve customers, but I suspect the 2015 ruling probably played less of a role than recent hikes in the minimum wage.

Nevertheless, the 2015 ruling was a bad one—a blatantly political move that violated the logic of both economics and legal liability. Tossing it out was the right thing to do.

Daily Caller/FCCAs part of his campaign to roll back the net neutrality rules imposed in 2015, Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai released a short parody video listing some things you'll still be able to do online after the vote. (The quick version: pretty much everything.) Toward the end of the video, Pai does the Harlem Shake, a dance that became a meme back in 2013.

Pai has attracted the ire of many an ill-informed opponent of the rollback. One of them, apparently, is Baauer, the producer behind the Harlem Shake. Baauer has announced he's taking legal action against the video.

Opponents of the rollback claim it threatens a "free and open" internet, but onerous intellectual property laws pose a far greater threat to a free and open internet than Pai's mild deregulation. It is copyright, after all, that Baauer is using to suppress a video whose message he doesn't like.

The Federal Communications Commission appears to have pulled the video off its YouTube channel (although it still appears on the Daily Caller website). That's unfortunate but not unsurprising. Baauer doesn't have a case: The use of the song pretty clearly falls under fair use as a parody (it appears in a portion of the video about driving memes to the ground). But copyright laws make bullying like this easy, and they've had an undeniable chilling effect on free expression online. Most content creators don't have the resources to fight even a specious takedown order, and so they often back down when facing a legal threat instead of trying to fight for their rights.

If you supporting Baauer's tactic, you don't actually support a free and open internet. Or at the very least, you don't have a good grasp of what a free and open internet entails.

Rock 'n' roll was born and baptized in a smoky nightclub somewhere, but the baby was conceived in a church. Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard were all raised Pentecostal, and their sounds were shaped by the raucous gospel music they grew up with. And Chuck Berry cribbed his duckwalk from a gospel singer called Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose guitar style helped lay the groundwork for rock.

Tharpe was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this week, alongside such worthies as Nina Simone and the Cars. If you find yourself doubting that this honor should be bestowed on a woman who was already in her forties when "Jailhouse Rock" hit the charts, watch this old clip from the NBC show TV Gospel Time, originally broadcast in 1962. For about a minute and 20 seconds, it may seem like an ordinary gospel performance. And then Sister Tharpe starts soloing:

A century ago, the early Pentecostals' multiracial revivals and ecstatic forms of worship sparked a moral panic. In the 1950s, rock 'n' roll provoked a similar reaction. Watching Tharpe play, you may start to see the outlines of more than one hidden continuity.

Just about all the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll—Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash—were Rosetta Tharpe fans. Gayle Wald's Tharpe bio Shout, Sister, Shout! quotes Jerry Lee Lewis falling over with praise for the woman: "I mean, she's singing religious music, but she is singing rock 'n' roll. She's...shakin', man....She jumps it. She's hitting that guitar, playing that guitar and she is singing. I said, 'Whoooo.' Sister Rosetta Tharpe." They say the Devil has all the best tunes, but he had to learn them somewhere.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)

Roy MooreYesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lamented that the concession speech from losing Alabama Republican senate candidate Roy Moore "should have already taken place." This morning, President Donald Trump said that "I think he should" concede. This makes obvious sense, in light of the 1.44-percentage-point lead that Democrat Doug Jones has in the unofficial results, well over the 0.5-point difference that triggers a recount according to Alabama law. Ever since Tuesday night, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill—a Moore supporter—has emphasized that it's "highly unlikely" the ballots will be counted again.

But Moore's "the battle rages on" intransigence makes all the sense in the world when judged by the example set by Trump himself.

Trump, you'll recall, made the baseless charge three weeks after the 2016 presidential election that "millions of people voted...illegally." In January, he narrowed that figure down to between three million and five million illegal votes. If true—and it isn't—that would mean that between 2.2 percent and 3.7 percent of all votes cast were fraudulent (and monolithically in favor of the Democrat).

What happens if you run those same numbers on the Alabama Senate race? Why, Roy Moore has a case! The margin between the top two finishers was 20,715 votes; an illegal voting rate of 2.2 to 3.7 percent would amount to between 29,615 and 49,807 fraudulent ballots cast. Stand tall, Roy!

Sadly, Trump's flippant conspiracy theorizing about polling integrity has more than just a cultural influence on the right. The president has made it the basis for his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a garbage fire of an advisory board whose vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is the leading voter-fraud fabulist in the country. Kobach, who is currently running for governor with the support of the president's son, has had ample opportunity to act upon his startling contention that "the illegal registration of alien voters has become pervasive" in his state. And yet, according to Mother Jones,

in 2015 he became the only secretary of state in the country with the power to personally prosecute voter fraud cases. Since then, Kobach's office has convicted just nine people for illegal voting, out of 1.8 million registered voters in the state. Only one of them was a non-citizen. The other eight were citizens who voted in two different states, and most of them were over 60 years old, owned property in both places, and were confused about voting requirements.

Among Kobach's bad ideas for the country is a massive federal database of voters (what could go wrong?). The commission is being riddled by lawsuits, including, remarkably, by one of its own members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (read Dunlap's Washington Post explainer for a snapshot of Trumpian amateurishness).

So yes, Roy Moore and his supporters are making fools of themselves spreading hoaxes and indulging in dark fantasies about voter fraud. But such pathologies have a seat in the same White House urging him to concede, and still threaten to convert conspiracy theory into federal election law.

Going to see the new Star Wars flick this weekend (read Kurt Loder's review here)? Or do you hate the Star Wars universe and can't figure out what the hell is wrong with all those people?

Either way, you'll want to watch this debate about the cultural meaning of Stars Wars and featuring Reason's Peter Suderman, Washington Free Beacon's Sonny Bunch, and The Washington Post's Alyssa Rosenberg. It dates from December 2015 and took place as Rogue One debuted. "All culture is participatory culture," I note at the outset in my role as moderator, and Star Wars has created the very template by which consumers create individualized meaning in their lives out of mass-produced media.

For more Reason coverage of Star Wars over the years, go here.

Chris PirilloA games company won't be able to stop the border wall.

Steven Greenhut writes:

What did you bring back from Mexico? There are no wrong answers, but "a zesty breakfast burrito," "an endless stream of diarrhea" or "a cooler full of organs" might help you win a round of Cards Against Humanity. It's a game where each player puts down a black card with a question—and the other players toss in a white card with the funniest or crudest answer. It's best played while downing tequila shooters.

It's not my cup of tea (or shot of reposado), but the makers of the game also are known for making edgy political points. Last year, a super PAC formed by the company's creators rented a billboard near Chicago that asks this question: "If Trump is so rich, how come he didn't buy this billboard?"

More recently, the company announced that it bought some land on the U.S.-Mexican frontier to help stop the border wall by making "it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built." The goal is to tie up land acquisitions in legal proceedings. It's a clever idea but couldn't possibly work for several reasons.

Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesIt's common to think of the U.S. Supreme Court in terms of liberal vs. conservative decisions, liberal vs. conservative doctrines, and liberal vs. conservative justices. But in the recent oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States, one of the biggest disagreements occurred between two of the Court's conservative members, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

At issue in Carpenter v. U.S. is whether federal law enforcement officials violated the Fourth Amendment by acquiring the cell phone records of a suspected armed robber, Timothy Carpenter, without first obtaining a search warrant for those records. Thanks to the information they obtained, federal investigators were able to trace back Carpenter's whereabouts during the time periods when several of his alleged crimes were committed, placing him in the vicinity of those crimes. That information was used against Carpenter in court.

The government insists that this warrantless search did not violate Carpenter's Fourth Amendment rights because, in the words of the Supreme Court's 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland, "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." In other words, Carpenter has no Fourth Amendment right to privacy in his cell phone records because he voluntarily used his cell phone, thus voluntarily disclosing his location to the various cell phone towers that handled his calls.

Throughout the November 29 oral arguments, Justice Alito was perhaps the most supportive of the government's position and the most critical of Carpenter's arguments. Justice Gorsuch, on the other hand, seemed extremely skeptical of the government's stance. Gorsuch even suggested at one point that the government's position was at odds with the "original understanding of the Constitution"—not exactly a compliment, since Gorsuch is a self-professed originalist.

But the real clash occurred after Gorsuch asked Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben to set aside the "third party" aspect of the debate and focus instead on whether the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches of a person's "papers and effects" should apply to the sort of digital information at issue here.

Raymond Clarke Images/flickrThe Philadelphia City Council's Public Health and Human Services Committee passed a bill yesterday to regulate the use of bulletproof glass at food establishments. The original bill would have banned bulletproof glass outright, but that was changed following backlash from store owners, who said the glass was needed for their protection.

Democratic Councilwoman Cindy Bass, a primary sponsor of the bill, insisted these delis were the cause, not an effect, of trouble in her district.

"We want to make sure that there isn't this sort of indignity, in my opinion, to serving food through a Plexiglas only in certain neighborhoods," Bass said.

Speaking from personal experience as a resident of Philadelphia, the presence of bulletproof glass correlates well with the places where the city already deploys more police officers and mobile units. Banning the glass won't improve safety; it'll just make shopkeepers less safe. The bill scapegoats small businesses that the council's constituents patronize.

Republican Councilman David Oh pointed out that if store owners were forced to remove the bulletproof glass, they would have an incentive to bring firearms to work instead.

"They're not changing their business model, they're not moving," Oh said, identifying a likely ulterior motive in hassling the businesses. "What they will do is purchase firearms. I think that is a worse situation than what we have today."

As passed, the bill leaves the option open for city bureaucrats to ban bulletproof glass later. In the meantime, it imposes new regulations on stores that sell food and beer. It calls on the Department of Licenses and Inspections to promulgate new rules on the "use or removal of physical barriers" by January 1, 2021. It also requires the establishments to maintain a public bathroom that is accessible without walking through a food preparation or otherwise restricted area. (One complaint about "beer delis" is public urination outside, so this measure is intended to curtail that.)

The bill also creates a distinction between "large establishments" (with 30 or more seats) and "small establishments," creating new licenses for the latter. Supporters of the bill complained that the smaller establishments claim to be restaurants but only offer packaged foods and have fewer than the 30 seats they were up to now mandated to have.

It's not clear from the text of the ordinance when the rules will be begin to be enforced. The 2021 date applies only to regulations on physical barriers.

A bill in the state legislature would counteract the city ordinance: State Rep. Todd Stevens (R–Montgomery County) is pushing legislation that would prohibit municipalities from making certain "workplace safety" decisions. Bass has responded by saying if Stephens liked the stores so much, he should bring them to his constituents.

RICHARD B. LEVINE/NewscomState lawmakers in Michigan and Indiana have fumbled opportunities to loosen longstanding laws limiting alcohol sales, leaving consumers with lukewarm brews and longer booze runs.

In other words, liquor store owners got exactly what they wanted.

Indiana lawmakers killed a proposal to abandon the state's bizarre "warm beer law," which says only liquor stores are allowed to see "cold or iced" brews. Other retailers—grocery stores, convenience stores, pharmacies, and the like—can only sell room-temperature beer. It is the only state in the country to regulate the sale of beer based on temperature.

A proposal to do away with that nonsensical restriction died in committee last week, The Indianapolis Star reports.

Like many weird state laws about alcohol sales, Indiana's warm beer law is a remnant of Prohibition. After the federal ban on selling alcohol was lifted in 1933, Indiana created different types of licenses for selling booze, and those licenses have evolved over time so that the same bottle of beer can be sold cold in one location but has to be warm in the store next door.

In Michigan, meanwhile, you won't find two next-door stores selling the same liquor at any temperature. Under the so-called "half mile rule," Michigan liquor stores must be located at least 2,640 feet from one another. The Michigan Liquor Control Commission struck down that protectionist rule earlier this year, but state lawmakers moved to resurrect it at the behest of liquor store owners, The Detroit News reports.

"You have families that have invested their life savings in a store, now suddenly they can have a store right across the street, right next to them?" state Sen. Rick Jones (R–Grand Ledge) told the newspaper.

If you think Jones' argument makes sense, try putting it in any other context. It would be ridiculous to suggest that McDonald's can stop Burger King from opening a new location "right across the street," no matter how much the existing franchisee might have invested. There's nothing inherently different about liquor stores, except that they sell booze instead of burgers.

The same is true of Indiana's warm beer rule. Imagine if Starbucks pushed through a law saying that Dunkin' Donuts could only sell lukewarm coffee. Everyone would recognize that as a ridiculous abuse of government power. Doing the same with beer has nothing to do with protecting consumers; it's just a special benefit bestowed on one business at the expense of the others.