An easy $5 million

Maine should have been out of the retail liquor business years ago. Gov. Angus King has been turned down again and again on this issue, but this year the governor seems even more serious about it and the Legislature should go along with him.

Maine’s 27 remaining state liquor stores are a forlorn and useless leftover from the old Prohibition movement. People had always drunk too much rum and whiskey, and starting nearly two centuries ago, Maine’s temperance campaigners led the nation. Sixty-nine citizens in 1815 formed the Total Abolition Society. They called themselves the “Sixty-niners” and crusaded against the “ardent spirits.” Mayor Neal Dow of Portland fought successfully for the enactment in 1851 of Maine’s Prohibition Statute. That law became the forerunner of the national Prohibition amendment, ratified in 1917.

With repeal, in 1933, Maine became one of 18 states to opt for state control of hard liquor. It set up a network of 70 state liquor stores as a monopoly operation. Starting in the 1980s, Maine relaxed its grip on the retail trade. It first licensed 70 liquor “agencies” in groceries and supermarkets. Privatization expanded, and there are now only 27 state stores and 200 agencies. Maine continues to import liquor and wholesale it to the agencies. With closure of all the state stores, the state would still limit the number of agencies, raising the total by only about 100.

The governor does not seek to end state wholesaling of liquor, which produces state revenue, fixes prices, and prevents rampant competitive advertising and promotion liquor.

The abolition movement has long since cooled, and the only remaining justification for the state liquor stores is that they provide jobs for about 100 people. Phasing them out will involve some hardship, but the governor has proposed a $200,000 appropriation for retraining them for positions elsewhere in state government or in the private sector. Unemployment is low, and jobs are plentiful.

Democratic lawmakers and supportive unions have defended the state liquor stores with odd arguments such as, without state control, whiskey will be sold next to corn flakes in grocery stores. That thought, offered by a Democratic leader in the last session, may have had some weight in about 1978, but since the number of agency stories – which keep food and liquor clearly separated – now far outnumber the state stores, it is meaningless. (Why it is OK with these lawmakers to sell wine one aisle away from corn flakes but not liquor anywhere in the same building is something of a mystery.)

Gov. King has on occasion been able to use the liquor stores as a bargaining chip with lawmakers. This time, Maine really needs the money. If the Legislature takes this easy way to help fill a big budget gap, the state will save about $5 million a year in the wages and overhead that now keep the state stores going. And Maine at last will get out of the retail liquor business.