In today’s roundup of bad legislation that is likely to cause more harm than good and tempt the fickle gods of unintended consequences, we offer two examples, one about to be born, and one so old that it predates the Revolution.
The new law of interest, of course, is the casino bill. As I said earlier this week, I’m not unalterably opposed to casinos. But (a) three is too many, and licensing three seems almost certain to guarantee that at least one will fail quickly, (b) slot barns stink, and (c) this bill has enough wrong with it that the legislature should be forced to try again. For example:
- “The one-year cooling-off period applies to all House and Senate members, as well as some local and state officials who have either helped to craft the bill or to negotiate with developers. The Senate had considered a five-year ban, but withdrew the proposal amid an uproar among senators.” Hilarious – “an uproar among senators,” some of whom were no doubt planning their soft landing on the Casino Commission and were appalled to discover that they might actually have to work for a few more years.
- “Both the House and Senate had previously agreed to set aside at least 9 percent of annual gambling profits from the slot machine parlor to subsidize the state’s horse racing industry. The compromise adopts language from the House that would take an additional 5 percent of the money from the one-time casino license fees for the horse racing fund, as well as 5 percent of annual taxes collected from casinos for the fund. The result of these changes will mean less money for local aid.” This is perhaps the worst development of the compromise bill. One of the biggest worries about casinos is that they will devastate the lottery, which, like it or not, is a big source of funding for local aid. So the idea that additional money should be diverted away from local aid into propping up a business that is run by the same folks who are hoping at least for a slot barn and maybe a casino license, who also happen to own a big facility in the Speaker’s district … well, it just stinks.
- As muckraking BMGer scout showed us earlier this week, the conflicts of interest extend beyond the embarrassing revelation that Secretary Bialecki owned casino stock. Senator Rosenberg’s apparent decision to purchase stock in a casino vendor in 2010 frankly calls the integrity of the whole process into question, and there may be other conflicts out there that haven’t been revealed yet.
The Governor should send this bill back with amendments to correct the worst of it. He should also make clear that, unless all conflicts of interest are cleared up by the time the bill arrives on his desk, he will veto it. Casinos already carry a big risk of corruption. We don’t want to start out on the wrong foot.
The bad old law in question is, of course, my favorite bugaboo, the freedom-destroying Blue Laws. At the risk of suffering the slings and arrows of numerous BMGers (including one of my esteemed co-editors), I cannot resist pointing to today’s Globe story, which details the tragic development that Massachusetts consumers may not be able to begin their Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving) shopping spree at 12:01 a.m., as many retailers had planned (and will do in other states). Because retailers not only may not open but may not have anyone working on the premises at any time on Thanksgiving Day, it is impossible to have the store ready to go for a midnight opening. Consequently, “Macy’s now plans a 12:30 a.m. opening on Black Friday, Target is scheduling a 1 a.m. start, and Walmart has pushed its kickoff to 4 a.m.” Oh the humanity.
As the Globe reports, “‘The blue laws are clear as mud in Massachusetts,’ said Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts.” I’ll therefore simply repeat what I’ve said many times before on this topic:
I have big philosophical objections to blue laws in general that I’ve discussed in previous posts and in the comments to them, and I won’t repeat those arguments here. But I also have a huge practical objection to the way these laws are written…. [T]hese laws all date from the 1600s, and they’ve been “modernized” in a piecemeal, almost random fashion over the years. There is simply no rhyme or reason to what is and is not allowed under these things. I argued in a comment to this post that “if the legislature really wants to enforce days of rest, it should do it right: wipe the law books clean, hold hearings, and write laws that make sense in light of the world today.”
marcus-graly says
If the blue laws put a dent in the holiday shopping madness that’s a good thing. Let the workers spend time with their families. Black Friday is stressful enough already.
sabutai says
Its religious roots notwithstanding, this law leads to a public good for Massachusetts. On the list of Mass. laws that need repeal, this isn’t too high up in my book.
jconway says
Have you worked in retail? You do realize people get a ton of OT for working on Black Friday?
centralmassdad says
They need to spend more time not working
David says
Um … really? Haven’t we been talking nonstop about the need for more jobs for the last, oh, two years or so?
David says
and my sarcasm meter is misadjusted. I hope so.
centralmassdad says
in order to indicate agreement without having to type a whole comment
stomv says
Most employees won’t make any extra OT that week. They’ll have Thursday off since stores are closed. They’ll work 8 hours on Friday — all employees, full or part time, will. Those extra 8 hours from Thursday will go toward one of the two days they normally have off (if lucky to be full time).
At the end of the week, they’ll have worked 40 hours (if full time) or perhaps a few more hours at straight time (if part time), and the only OT they’ll see is their 1.5 pay for Sunday work, which has nothing to do with whether or not they work Black Friday.
Unless you work 40 hours Monday through Saturday, the only additional pay rate you see in your check is because you worked on a Sunday. With no work on Thursday, it will be the extremely rare retail employee who hits for by Saturday evening.
JimC says
I wouldn’t worry about the wrong foot, David, when we’re about to wallow in mire.
The governor does realize, I hope, that this bill is his legacy? His entire legacy?
SomervilleTom says
How, precisely, can anyone tell whether the conflicts have been “cleared up”? It appears to this observer that the legislature and the Governor were corrupted by the proponents of casino gambling a LONG time ago. Surely the campaign funds are already not just in the bank, but spent.
How many Richard Vitale-style non-lobbyist lobbyists are flitting around Beacon Hill? The Senate reacted in outrage at the mere mention of the five-year waiting period — how many of them already have their contracts in hand?
The bill hasn’t been signed yet, and we see reports that Hard Rock plans a casino at the Wyckoff Country Club in Holyoke. Mohegan Sun has proposed a casino in Palmer. Who is listening to the abutters of Wyckoff Country Club on Mt. Tom Ave, Calvin Lane, or Joanne Drive? Who uses the Whiting Street Reservoir, what impact will a HUGE casino have on reservoir and its surrounding habitat? Is there anybody at the table with power to answer the wheeler-dealers (literally, apparently) of Hard Rock, International? How many hundreds of millions of dollars in such real-estate investments, construction contracts, zoning changes, etc., etc., etc., are already out there — how do those get “cleaned up”?
It’s way way too late to avoid “starting out on the wrong foot”. The question now is whether this flagrantly corrupt train can be stopped.
usergoogol says
The final version of the bill seems to allow casinos to give out free drinks but continues to ban happy hours. This is entirely backwards. People should not consume alcohol when doing things with serious consequences, like betting large sums of money or driving heavy equipment. On the other hand, getting drunk in a building designed explicitly for the purposes of inebriation and then taking public transportation home is a lot safer. As such, casinos are precisely the place where we don’t want to be liquoring people up, but legalizing happy hours seems like a potentially decent idea even without bars getting all worked up over losing customers.
SomervilleTom says
We used to have happy hours. LOTS of people died as a result. That’s why we stopped them.
Happy hours appeal to workers on their way home. Workers who drive cars stop at a bar after work, get drunk at happy hour, and then try to drive home. They won’t take public transportation home — many workers can’t take public transportation at all (because it isn’t available), that’s why they drive.
Happy hours kill people.
Using alcohol to drug casino players so that they’ll squander their money is a fine example of why this whole business is so flagrantly wrong.
usergoogol says
Perhaps they could limit it to bars within a certain range of the MBTA or something. But I guess that seems like a valid concern.
I wouldn’t say this whole business is flagrantly wrong. A lot of businesses would liquor up their customers in order to boost sales if they could get away with it. Casinos merely happen to be in the sort of business where they can get away with it. But that’s a matter of regulatory structure.
usergoogol says
Hmm… I wonder if it would be possible to implement a system by which people had to show that they used some sort of public transportation in order to qualify for discounts. Like, you pay full price out of pocket but you get a rebate if you tap your Charlie Card within a certain timeframe or something. That would be unfair to pedestrians, but I suppose they’re a small percentage of the happy hour crowd.
SomervilleTom says
Massachusetts once had happy hours. We had a horrific death toll from drunk drivers. We stopped the happy hours. The drunk-driving fatalities were immediately lower.
We recognized, identified, and solved a problem. The solution (no happy hours) works. I see no need to “fix” that solution.
centralmassdad says
And drunk driving fatalities declined thereafter. We have had mostly Republican governors since then. Electing Republican governors must be the cause of the decline.
usergoogol says
The goal of liberalism is to allow people to live their life however they want. People dying is a vastly more important problem than people not being able to get cheap booze, and as such banning happy hours are a reasonable solution, but they are both problems, since both things prevent people from being to live their life how they want. As such, if you can manage to solve both problems simultaneously, that would be even nicer.
David says
Without qualification, that’s not really accurate. As the old saying goes, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
usergoogol says
Well, that’s still kind of about maximizing the ability of people to be as free as possible. Your freedom to hit me in the nose takes away my freedom to not be hit in the nose, so if you want to maximize the total amount of freedom, you should put regulations on nose-punching.
More generally, I’d say the big difference between liberalism and libertarianism is that liberals acknowledge that maximizing freedom gets rather messier. Libertarians try to keep it simple: just don’t engage in acts of coercion and everyone wins, no need for messy tradeoffs. But liberals acknowledge that things are complicated, and as such admit that the freedom to pollute has to be balanced against the freedom to be able to enjoy an unpolluted environment, and the freedom to acquire property has to be balanced against the freedom of others to have enough resources of their own to live a reasonable life. But I still think you can broadly summarize this as letting people live their lives how they want. It’s just that when it’s impossible for everyone to get everything they want, you have to make tradeoffs.
But yeah, a point worth making explicit.
Ryan says
The free drinks on the casino floor survived the conference. I’m sure that will improve drunk driving, right? /sarcasm off
Meanwhile, restaurants, bars and pubs have long been banned from giving out free booze and AFAIK will continue to be, illustrating again the power of the lobbyists and the dirty politics going on here.
sue-kennedy says
back room deals and special interest give-aways, it looks like the race horse industry has been earmarked 5% of the licensing fees or approximately $14 million, plus 9% of the taxes collected from the racino. Apparently the give away to a small group of politically connected at the same time the percentage to local aid was cut from 25% down to 20%.
Really? What were the factors that led to the determination that it was more important to the welfare of our state to give taxpayer money to racetracks over cities and towns, fire, police and schools?
Why the horse racing industry? Certainly they are not the only cash-strapped business in the Commonwealth.
This is the result of the government picking winners and losers on the advice of an army of lobbyists.
JHM says
Obviously.
However, if for some quaint gentrified provincial reason like fails to appeal to like on this occasion, the thing to do is to reduce the Winthrop Era legislation to mere penal laws: leave such prohibitions on the books forever, but collect a gigantic fine (fee, tax, license, dispensation, whatever) for each and every violation.
Malignant recusants like WalMart won’t soon be comin’ to the little blue church on the Great Big Hill for services in any case, but this way everybooby can he semisatisfied. The heretics do get their conventicles, but the Orthodox GBHers get the satisfaction of showing them that they are still second-class subjects nevertheless.[*]
Happy days.
___
[*] ¿How come a fine upstandin´ Corporate Citizen can never get a break around here?
Trickle up says
just like the ones you dislike. They all inhibit commerce and infringe on individual choice to protect certain public goods.
Every argument you make against the blue laws you dislike (except for the procedural, historical ones, which I think are weakest) can be made against the happy-hour ban as well.
SomervilleTom says
The happy-hour ban was a direct result of an extraordinarily high drunk-driving fatality rate — many of whom had NOT been drinking, but were killed by drunks who chose to exercise their “individual choice” in deadly and irresponsible ways. A large portion of these drunk drivers admitted that they got drunk at a happy-hour in some bar. A large portion of the car-crashes they caused happened in early evening major commuter routes.
At the time, I lived on a busy commuter route in Billerica MA. I got to know our local police and ambulance drivers because drunks crashed into the trees and telephone poles in front of my house pretty much every week — an enormous number of them coming from various happy-hours. That carnage stopped when the ban took effect.
The rate of all these crashes immediately and precipitously declined when the happy-hour ban was imposed.
I invite you to offer an example of a blue law that shares this history, motivation, and results.
Trickle up says
and since you think you must hate all blue laws, you pretend it isn’t one.
Honestly, that is the only sense I can make of your comment. I don’t think you even read mine.
David says
you’re the only person I’ve ever seen refer to the happy hour ban as a blue law. Generally, blue laws are
The happy hour ban does share certain characteristics with blue laws, but it lacks others, and therefore IMHO doesn’t really qualify.
centralmassdad says
Though it certainly doesn’t meet the wikipedia definition.
I have always lumped all of these busy-body “for your own good” laws (no alcohol sales on Sunday, no retail business on Thanksgiving, the happy hour ban, and indeed Prohibition and all of its temperance-movement forebears, along with bans on gambling, no smoking, even outdoors!) to qualify as “Blue Laws.”
As for, “reduced drunk driving deaths”– this seems to assume facts not in evidence. Since Massachusetts is the only state to enact such a ban, one would expect to see better results in Massachusetts compared with states that did not. But one does not see such results, but rather sees Massachusetts in the middle of the pack. Which suggests that increased education and criminal penalties, restrictions on serving the already intoxicated, and a change in culture likely has more to do with the decline in drunk driving fatalities since 1984.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t know if you lived here in 1984 or not; I did.
The reduction in drunk driving crashes was immediate. Another public policy change that helped enormously was raising the drinking age from 18 to 20 in 1979 and then to 21 in 1984.
I don’t know where you get the idea that “Massachusetts is the only state to enact [a happy hour ban]. The NHTSA says:
I similarly don’t know where you get the idea that Massachusetts is “in the middle of the pack”. Sources like this (based on NHTSA reports) report that (emphasis mine):
Your comment seems to be making up “facts” that simply aren’t true.
I KNOW that the changes Massachusetts made in between 1980 and 1984 significantly reduced the drunk-driving problem. I lived through it.
centralmassdad says
Massachusetts has fewer deaths of any state because we have congested roads. That latter report has nothing whatsoever to do with drunk driving rates, in which Massachusetts seems pretty average. One would expect that Massachusetts would perform better than NY, a state that is similar to Massachusetts in a great many ways.
The former report conflates all kinds of junk that makes it hard to determine anything, first by treating over-serving prohibitions with discount prohibitions, and then seeming to suggest that the primary issue to be solved here is not drunk driving, but rather underage and college-age “binge” drinking— which suggests that the impetus behind the ban is indeed the morality police come to tell you what to do and how to do it.
SomervilleTom says
I most certainly did read your comment. I confess that I am at best confused by it, perhaps you can clarify.
The seat belt law “infringe[s] on personal choice”. In your opinion, is it a “blue law”? The laws against heroin possession and sale “inhibit commerce” and “infringe on personal choice”. In your opinion, are they “blue laws”?
Like David, I think the term “blue law” implies a motivation in religious dictate or custom. Can you clarify what YOU mean by “blue law”?
Whether “blue law” or not, are you suggesting that the happy hour ban is a bad idea that should be reversed?
Trickle up says
as I said, it protects important public goods. The current proposal is grotesque.
I happen to feel the work-hour infringement on commerce to which David objects does a similar sort of thing.
I suppose that is debatable, but pointing and saying Oh, that’s a blue law, we don’t like those, does not further that debate in any way for me.
I still think David has a bit of a double standard in that respect, but also that I did not make my point very well either. So, sorry.
syphax says
Have I just not been paying attention, or did this bill come through all quiet-like? My rep voted in favor, but at least my senator did not.
I have many issues with casinos, but here’s the big one: they suck during recessions. The last thing we need during the next (current?) recession are money-losing casinos.