Subsidize neighborhood bars

Plus: Americans vs. open-container laws!

As I laid out in a recent VinePair column, I believe the state has a role to play in addressing the market’s unmet needs for social spaces decoupled from obligatory commerce. Imagine libraries, but for socializing. A place where alcohol is available but not emphasized, and buying shit is purely optional. You get it.

Meeting public demand that private markets cannot or will not is a normal function of government, or it was until a cabal of American industrials imported and disseminated crank economic theories into the national discourse to poison rank-and-file folks against New Deal liberalism. This country has struggled ever since to countenance even the most self-evidently beneficial forms of municipal socialism, so I’m not so deluded to think taxpayer-funded third places are a near-term goal (though tipsters have since flagged some promising green shoots!) But the demand is there. Americans are lonely as fuck and starved of the joys of the commons. We need a hybrid solution to hold us over, and breweries—comfortable and welcoming though many of them are—ain’t it.

Luckily, a proven model for small-scale, hyper-local, low-overhead hubs of non-optimized, non-extractive community that weave themselves into their surrounding social fabrics already exists: the neighborhood bar. Neighborhood bars are great, but as an on-premise cohort, they’re not exactly doing great. But in order for them become more profitable under the present model, they’d have to pump more alcohol into the populace. Not ideal for public health. So it’s even luckier that we have a method for public-private partnership to prop up American industries collectively deemed vital that are not profitable: the subsidy. You can probably see where I’m headed with this.