Modern Pharisees think the state makes virtue

During my first trip to Salt Lake City, I wandered from my hotel room in search of a drink, found a modest pub and went to order a beer or three. “Sir, this is a private club,” the bouncer told me. I headed toward the door feeling dejected and confused.

This certainly doesn’t look like an exclusive joint.

At that point, the bouncer started laughing, realizing that I was the latest out-of-towner who was unaware of Utah’s Mormon-inspired booze laws. He could sell me a temporary membership for five bucks, to which I happily obliged. I still have that membership card in a drawer somewhere.

To reduce drinking, Utah banned bars, but allowed an exception for private clubs — so bar owners came up with a workaround that accomplished nothing other than adding a fee on bar hoppers. It was a reminder of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s words: “We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.”

Utah eliminated that silly private-club requirement in 2009, although states still have vestiges of these so-called “blue laws,” which refer to Puritan-era relics that restrict alcohol sales and certain activities such as shopping on Sundays (to observe the Sabbath). The term likely is “based on an 18th-century usage of the word blue meaning ‘rigidly moral’ in a disparaging sense,” according to Brittanica.

Oddly enough, a new group of post-liberal (in the free-market sense of the word) conservatives are pushing for a restoration of these religious-based laws. Pressed for policy prescriptions in their traditionalist agenda, Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule and the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari floated the idea of restoring the sanctity of the Sabbath.

“A campaign for the Sabbath can bring together labor unions, religious conservatives, and small-business owners (that last group historically opposed abolishing blue laws for lack of ability to compete),” Ahmari wrote this month in The American Conservative. Yet Ahmari inadvertently points to one of the major problems with these laws.

Instead of promoting virtue, they become a means by which special interests — such as small businesses and beer distributors — abuse the legislative process to limit competition. For instance, alcohol distributors and unions have united to oppose California legislation that allows distillers and breweries to ship