A delicious side-effect of Milton Friedman brain

By a coincidence of technological progress and American life expectancy, we live in an age of always-on media and the demise of some of the worst motherfuckers the American political firmament has yet produced. This has created some tremendous results.

When noted war criminal and Henry Kissinger finally died at 100 in 2023, for example, the internet exploded with posts from random social media users and decorated journalists alike to ensure that whatever gauzy hagiographies his powerful cronies hoped to pen would be complicated by the reality of his zealous, racist slaughter. Naturally, this always prompts tut-tutting about probity and comity from norms-humping centrists and reactionary dorks; then making fun of them turns into a whole thing in and of itself. The thrills of an interconnected world are vast and profound.

When Jimmy Carter died with two days to go on 2024 (also at the ripe old age of 100), there was considerably less of a rush to trample on the old man’s grave. By the impossibly low standards of Oval Office, Georgia’s favorite peanut farmer was almost-decent fellow. (Almost.) Beyond Carter’s widely publicized post-presidency penance with Habitat for Humanity, one fond memory that came up a lot during his mostly positive obituary cycle was the fact that he paved the way for the American craft brewing industry’s boom in the Eighties by deregulating homebrewing at the federal level in 1978.

It’s a happy story, and a true one, which is more than you can say for most happy stories promulgated about former residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you’re interested, I discussed Carter’s (indirect) role in ushering in the country’s remarkable pivot to full-flavored beer with Charlie Papazian, the founder of the Brewers Association and the American Homebrewers Association, in this 2023 episode of VinePair’s Taplines.

This was common-sense deregulation. Times had changed, and a relic of the post-Prohibition legal code was holding back the collective leisure of a generation of amateur tinkerers like Papazian. There was no powerful homebrewing lobby calling on Carter to sign H.R. 1337—a Christmas tree bill that had nothing to do with cottage production of ales and lagers, by the way—into law for its own benefit. Alan Cranston, a California senator with ties to the American brewing hotbed UC-Davis, just tucked a provision in there that canceled the moot federal excise tax requirements on homemade beer. Things flowed from there.

You could argue that craft beer was going to happen one way or another: after all, the country saw a parallel proliferation of craft distillers last decade despite the fact that making your own moonshine was federally illegal until this past July, when a federal judge in Texas struck down that 156-year ban. You could also argue that the explosion of craft breweries in the decades that followed degraded working conditions in the American brewing industry writ large. There’s some data to support that: for example, it helped to erode union density in the business. Still, homebrewing deregulation happened on Carter’s watch, and compared to other achievements of Carter’s deregulatory regime, the tradeoffs—basically, “more breweries making more high quality beer in exchange for zero lost tax revenue and more disperse/difficult labor-organizing targets”—netted out for the better.

History looks less kindly upon Jimmy Cardigan’s other signature slashes of red tape, all of which he did very much on purpose.

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