Montgomery County Alcohol Beverage Services (aka the County’s Corporate Liquor Monopoly, profiled in our series here by Clean Slate’s Michael Bell) is launching a podcast… “Spirited Discussions”. An August 14 County press release / update announced it:
“Montgomery County Alcohol Beverage Services (ABS) has introduced a new podcast series, Spirited Discussions: A Podcast by Montgomery County Alcohol Beverage Services, to help residents and businesses understand alcohol products, trends and policies in Montgomery County. The first episode, “Welcome to Alcohol Beverage Services,” is available now.
The series pairs experts from ABS with outside guests to answer some of the most often-asked questions about alcohol sales, service and public health and safety. Listeners will learn what the liquor board does, how the highly allocated lotteries work, where the revenue goes and how they can find new, rare, innovative or local products.”
What a crock. Of course, County Executive Marc Elrich chimed in with a canned statement.
Alcohol Beverage Services adds so much value to our community, not just through the revenue it generates, but also by building health, safety, and equity into the system.
What an absolute joke. How does a liquor monopoly build “health, safety and equity” into a “system”? Again, this dinosaur of local government exists purely for revenue maximization and to prop up a select few County employees and as such, it is in the business of selling as much liquor and wine as it can to consumers. There is no “health” aspect here. They are literally in the (legal, yes) toxin-selling business.
A final word on this from our Michael Bell back in August of last year:
In summary, as happens with any government-granted monopoly, the only people who benefit from ABS are workers, vendors, and sometimes (but not always) the government that granted the monopoly. Everybody else is spending time and money supporting them in return for goods and services of inferior quality.
MoCo’s ABS states that “Listeners are encouraged to email ideas and questions for future podcasts to abs.spiriteddiscussions@montgomerycountymd.gov.”
We definitely have a few questions and ideas for the monopolists.
