RADAMISTO: ECONOMICS DOES NOT SWALLOW SOCIETY

There aren't always free market solutions to problems no matter how much the Free Market Fairy crowd repeats that idiocy.? A case in point is Germany's beer brewing industry, which despite being around for centuries, is much less economically efficient than the American industry:

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It turns out that the German beer industry suffers from small-scale production. There are 1,000 little local beer companies in Germany, shielded from competition with each other because each German brewery has virtually a local monopoly, and shielded from competition with imports. The United States has 67 major beer breweries, producing 23 billion liters of beer per year. Germany has 1,000 major beer breweries, producing only half as much beer per year as the United States. That's to say that the average brewery in the U.S. produces 31 times more beer than the average brewery in Germany.

That fact results from German local tastes and German government policies. German beer drinkers are fiercely loyal to their local brand of beer. And so there is no national brand of beer in Germany, analogous to Budweiser or Miller or Coors in the United States. Instead, most German beer is consumed within 30 miles of the place where it is brewed. And any of you who have been in Germany know that Germans love their local beer and loathe the beer that comes from next door.

The result is that the German beer industry cannot profit from economies of scale.

Source: http://radamisto.blogspot.com/2012/10/economics-does-not-swallow-society.html

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