Following up on what Aaron said, it’s possible that Mr. Meyer doesn’t understand the concept of value added. In his Herald-Leader response to Aaron, Mr. Meyer writes:
Wine, which typically contains between 11 percent and 14 percent alcohol by content, is an alcoholic beverage, not a value-added agricultural product. Grape juice is a value-added agricultural product.
Wikipedia has a fair defintion of value added:
In modern neoclassical economics, especially in macroeconomics, [value added] refers to the contribution of the factors of production, i.e., land, labor, and capital goods, to raising the value of a product and corresponds to the incomes received by the owners of these factors.
In Mr. Meyer’s view, the labor and capital employed to turn grapes into grape juice delivers value to the final product. But somehow - transubstantiation, perhaps - the labor and capital used by vintners to turn wine grapes into wine simply doesn’t deliver any value … no matter how much more profitable wine might be over a big pile of wine grapes.
In the very next paragraph, Mr. Meyer says this:
Beverage alcohol products — distilled spirits, beer and wine — are the only products sold in the marketplace that are the subject of two amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Because of the potential harmful effects of abuse of these products, the government stringently regulates their sale and consumption.
It’s probably worth noting that the two amendments to which Mr. Meyer refers are the 18th and 21st. Technically speaking, the 18th Amendment is no longer a part of the U.S. Constitution. The 21st Amendment repealed it. Given that the 21st Amendment is little more than an open admission that the 18th Amendment was a terrible mistake, what point is Mr. Meyer trying to make?
The headline of his article is, “Regulation of wine sales protects public.” It doesn’t help his case to say that the one time an amendment to the U.S. Constitution was repealed was to abolish a particularly stringent regulation on alcohol.
