Is there somewhere I can sign for imperial pints? :-> (Best reason for the U.S. to join the Commonwealth)

A pint's a pound the world around -- except in Oregon :-(

Hey, thanks Kari! I try to keep my beer manias and my politics manias aside. But this will goose the signature numbers, which is the goal. Honest pints for all--to arms!

Steve,

Who said anything about the federal government? Weights & measures reliability are a state function that even libertarians would agree to. It's an ancient role, the next step after the king guaranteeing the quality of the currency.

Kari shows that the state admits it's its function but isn't performing it or planning to do so.

Your advice might produce quicker results, however, provided one tells the business in question that you are moving and why. Boycotts notoriously don't work if the target doesn't know they're happening :->.

Better still to organize. Jeff's taking the positive approach (what turn-of-the-century anti-sweatshop advocates trying to mobilize consumers to support exploited workers called a "white list"): encourage people to patronize the businesses that do the the right thing. Now that Jeff's created the resource, we should publicize it.

If you want to go further than rewarding the honest, tell those you're leaving you're doing so.

In Germany, all beer glasses are marked with a line near the top denoting the point at which the glass contains the specified amount of beer (0.5 liters, 1 liter, etc.). Perhaps, in the absence of regulatory enforcement of this issue, the Oregon Brewers Guild or someone could take the lead and start serving pints marked with such a line.

I notice that most of those on this thread who think this is unimportant are not beer drinkers. As one of those who thinks Oregon is close to heaven because it has such great beer, I treat those two ounces as precious gold.

However, I will admit Blue Oregon is not where we should be discussing this. We should be at one of those pubs that serves a real pint.

Merry Christmas to all.

Folks who drink orange juice, you forward a common argument heard on the right: since I don't use this service, why should (pick one) it exist; I have to pay for it; you whiners care; etc. The response is always the same. In a society, we all chip in for things that affect us collectively. I am childless, but am happy to have half my state taxes go to schools. I drive about 25% as much as the average Oregonian, but I'm willing to pony up a full share. And so it goes.

Steve, you inadvertently also forward the righty argument: let the market decide. But think about what chaos your theory would reap elsewhere. What if you paid $3 for a gallon of gas and had to trust that the gas station wasn't underfilling? What about milk--or orange juice, say--sold by the bottle, but unlabled, so you just had to do an eyeball calculation about the container's size in the grocery store?

Let's take it further. What about restaurant and pub owners--it's not only the customer who gets screwed. Many establishments do offer honest pints, but how can they fairly compete if they don't know what their competition is serving? The playing field isn't fair. Even to free-marketers, surely that's a compelling argument for government regulation. Commerce depends on it.

What I'm requesting here is not a beer gestapo. In fact, my guess is that most folks haven't a clue that the standards vary--on either end of the transaction. This would just clarify it so everyone knows what's happening. It's a small act and would neither burden the state nor pub and restaurant owners--but would produce a substantial benefit.

Chris--thanks for the nice words!

I'd like to take what Eric first said and run in a different direction. People do have allergies to certain ingredients in some beers. By that same token, certain brews use fish biproducts and such, which sucks when you're a vegan.

While we're reforming beer statutes, any support for regulating allergy/dietary information on bottles? Just say, right on the bottle: contains isinglass.

Anyone?

And I should again emphasize that only some beers are not vegan-friendly. To my knowledge all of Rogue's brews are a-okay.

someone mentioned it in passing, but I bet if you discovered you were only getting .85 of a gallon at the pump, you'd be rightfully pissed. A pint is a unit of measure, not a catchy name. It has a specific meaning in the a, and if you sell something according to a specified unit measure, they should be forced to adhere to that standard.

Besides, everyone knows. REAL pint is 20 oz. :)

If you want more beer, do the sensible thing. Buy another round.

I smell the beverage industry here at BlueO.

But David, don't you get pissed (angry, not drunk) when some barkeep throws a whole mess of small, fast-melting ice cubes into your scotch rather than a block that won't water it down? It's an issue of getting what you pay for, not getting another beer.

Oh, excuse me, mrfearless, for practicing my convictions and a healthy diet in my daily life. I wasn't aware I was imposing on you so much. I'll be careful next time to not knock the glass of milk out of your hand.

I'm not worried about it, I was making a point about people with food allergies and different diets. Many products now carry disclaimers at the end of their lists of ingredients that say, "contains soy" or "contains milk." Why not beer?

It was just a thought. I didn't know I was going to make anyone gag. Sorry for so horribly crossing the line with my vitriol.

Well played, David. Well played.

Ouch! That internet-slap in the face sure stings!

As for the question of regulation, I think beer's status as a "luxury" is what the rub is here. But, for me, that doesn't mean we should just "let the market sort it out." But I guess any money spent on perceived frivolity is a free-market crime in some people's eyes.

Miles,

Not all progressives agree that government power should only be used "when the market has failed."

Markets are good at producing certain kinds of efficiencies and not others. Government is more efficient for some purposes. Non-market private relationships or non-state public ones may be best for others.

Health care is a good example. Market-based health care may be more "economically efficient" from the point of view of accumulation of wealth in the whole economy. E.g. the invisible hand "rules" that money is "better used" to buy someone a hummer than to make sure someone else has adequate health care because the hummer purchase will create more wealth in the system.

But that economic efficiency depends on health-inefficiency. It can't really be called a market failure, because markets work on a principle of exclusion in how they distribute scarce resources. Rather, the problem is that markets aren't efficient at achieving results in which exclusions aren't acceptable, or not beyond a certain point.

Also, the formulation as you put it artificially separates markets from government or the state. Markets can't exist without government, or at least not beyond a very primitive form. Government is necessary to deter theft, fraud, and coercion, to enforce contracts, to guarantee the value of money; in more complex markets government through law creates the organizational structures of markets themselves and of entities operating in markets; and, for the last century or so, provides central banking institutions that regulate (in the original sense drawing on a metaphor from steam pressure in steam engines) the tendencies of completely free markets to gyrate widely in boom and bust cycles characterized by protracted depressions of low liquidity and low confidence, as well as massive periodic destructions of wealth associated with such depressions.

If you go back to the classical political economists, they defined civil society as public society outside of the domestic realm, i.e. including state and market together, because they were closer to the foundational acts by which governments created the conditions for capitalist markets. The latter, far from being natural, are rare in human history until the last two centuries.

Partly as a result, markets are not simply realms of freedom. One key foundational act in the creation of capitalist markets involves the expropriation of land previously held in common to the private (=exclusive=right to exclude) property of a person or legally recognized entity. The owner gains freedom over that property, everyone else loses freedoms to use commons that they used to have. "Free labor" presents interesting tensions within freedoms of contract. At one stage the U.S. tried to have a system in which property in persons (which sort of turns slaves into a combination of labor and capital) coexisted with a system that said persons could not be owned but that they had a property right in their labor that they could contract for sale. After contracts for sale of persons (including self-alienation) became illegal, contracts in which employers could make agreement not to join a union a condition of employment ("yellow dog contracts") were legal for a long while, restricting workers' freedom of association, even as government created legal instruments to facilitate associations of capitalists by limiting investors' liability and other means. Trade unions were often treated as combinations in restraint of trade, rather than free associations.

Likewise current law forces workers to give up most of their civil liberties upon entering the workplace. There is no inherent reason this should be so, it is just that the state has sided with owners/employers in their freedom to determine workplace conditions over the freedoms of workers.

Market ideology also exaggerates the freedom of choice within markets, obscuring constraints on choice that markets create and allowing various forms of economic coercion and legal extortion.

Over time this picture has been modulated by other kinds of regulations, but those are not best understood as government responding to market failures. Rather, they are best understood as responses to economic relationships as sociological relationships involving power. Safety regulations in factories do not represent a response to market failure; they represent a response to economic calculus that treats workers as expendable and replaceable human machines, the costs of whose injuries may be either completely externalized (fire the injured) or penciled in as costs of doing business.

Short version -- markets are creations of states and characteristics and distributions of freedoms within them are a function of the laws that create and govern them. And governments have legitimate functions that they inherently perform more efficiently and effectively than markets, not merely filling in for "market failures." The idea the markets should be the default option is an ideological proposition that is not obvious and should not be accepted uncritically by progressives. IMO.

I don't drink beer at all, but I can definitely see the issue.

A pint glass is called a pint glass because of how much liquid it holds. Anything else is false advertising, and I'd definitely be upset if I were buying them.

From Wikipedia:

A pint glass is a drinking vessel holding an imperial pint (568 ml/19.2 US fl oz) of liquid that is usually used for beer or cider.

To me, this would be no different than buying a "gallon" jug of milk that only can hold 112 ounces in it (a gallon is 128 ounces, 112 ounces is 87.5% of a gallon).

Miles,

I think we've got two different definitions of "market failure" going here. There is a difference between the kind of market failure of which a bank panic might be a simple example, and the spheres of life that markets cannot effectively address because the social relationships or social aims involved aren't compatible with inherent distributional characteristics of markets.

You are counting the latter as market failures. I don't because the relationships involved historically precede markets.

"Primitive" exchanges in the absence of states are only the crudest sort of market. What we mean by markets here cannot exist without states, and the conditions and institutional forms of the markets are created by laws made by states.

Non-capitalist economies have limited markets, but mostly their economies are characterized by other kinds of relationships and transactions. See Marshall Sahlins Stone Age Economics for a useful discussion of a spectrum of forms of reciprocity, tied to kinship and related issues of trust and moral obligation. Market relations in his schema constitute "negative reciprocity," insofar as persons acting most purely in market terms seek only personal advantage. It just isn't true that "primitive" economies relied much on markets.

Ancient Greek city-states give an interesting view. Early on markets (real physical spaces in almost all societies until very recently) were literally liminal -- set at the limits of the town. This is quite typical, early markets often are located at boundary points between polities. As ancient Greek poli evolved, and their markets, their political or public economies (as distinguished from their economies proper, the good ordering of households, from oikos, Greek for household) became more central and associated with the emergence of public political discourse (as distinct from private, covert palace politics).

If you want to twist yourself into a mental pretzel like pre-Copernican astronomers trying to save the Ptolemaic theory of spheres you can sometimes make a case that non-capitalist economic relationships look something like what you might see in a market, if you squint and tilt your head just the right way, but to do that you have to ignore how the people involved actually think about what they are doing. Part of the reason we say we're in a market economy is because we are in one consciously and intentionally.

It is exactly the Ptolemaic quality of too much economic reasoning, which does not use theory to understand the world and adjust it according to empirical evidence, that makes so much of it ideology rather than social science. This has bad policy consequences, such as prejudging debates in favor of market mechanisms to a degree not justified by their actual success. The parlous state of the U.S. healthcare system is an obvious salient example.

With certain possible exceptions -- some scholars will argue that the economy of the Roman empire was one, and it may be that a similar case could be made for China at some periods, I'm not sure -- before the advent of modern capitalism, markets existed in varying degrees but were not the fundamental characteristic of the economy. That's why we distinguish feudalism from capitalism, for instance.

Without government, there's no money, no neutral arbitration and enforcement of contracts, no punishment of fraud or restraint from coercion amongst traders, no financial instruments or rules governing their exchange, the list would get quite extensive if we followed it out.

The market ideologues would have us believe that market relationships are the "natural" form of human economic relationship. That is anthropologically, historically and empirically false. But it is a very convenient ideology for restricting political debate in inegalitarian ways.

P.S., Miles, I should also say that I've spent a considerable portion of my adult life studying the history of societies in Africa including their economic transformations both over millenia but more particularly in the past 500 or 600 years. Those histories involve situations in which the novelty and human institutional character of markets is more obvious than from inside a well-developed market economy where many things are naturalized to us. They also force one to confront the fact that people's actions can't very well be explained by markets in many instances.

But it's not just Africa -- a historian of medieval or even early modern Europe or the ancient Mediterranean or classical India or China or the Near East would see the same things. Cf. Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation, e.g. or the work of Max Weber.

Markets are very powerful but we should not mystify them, nor fail to recognize that like any other power, the fact of power says nothing about whether it's used for good or ill.

I signed without paying. I don't know what you're talking about.

Me too. No idea what Thaddeus is talking about.

Now, now... please stay on topic.