The competing “President of Beers” ad campaigns are vaguely amusing, but fortunately we don’t actually choose beer in a national election. Often, votes in a political election are compared with dollars spent in a market, but in reality elections and markets are two fundamentally different ways of selecting something.
Beer selection via
bulletsballots:- Whichever beer won would be the only beer available for the next four years.
- You would have to pay for the elected beer whether you liked it or not, or even if you didn’t drink beer.
- Even if you had no strong preference for Bud or Miller, you would be admonished to vote, as that would somehow, magically, improve the quality of the choice.
- If you did have a strong preference, some elementary math would tell you that voting for it would have essentially no chance of influencing the outcome.
- People would get in loud confrontational arguments on the merits of Bud vs. Miller. Even sober people.
- If you started talking about microbrews or imports, people would consider you a bit nutty.
- The Complete Joy of Homebrewing would be a book owned only by wacky anarchists.
- In order to appeal to the least common denominator, Miller and Budweiser would eventually come to have nearly identical, weak, flavors. Oh, wait.
- Despite this, people who had never tried other beers would insist that the two are quite different
Blah, more election tomfoolery you cry. It’s from one of my favorite columnists Andy Stedman (who also penned the Public Goods post many moons ago), so it’s good as gold.
In sporting news, the Ohio State University is under the microscope for allegedly violating NCAA fiduciary regulations. It is this authors most humble opinion, that the entire system is one big clusterfuck, as illustrated best by The Drake Group. Grey poupon anyone?