This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 4, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Wine wholesalers say an epidemic of alcohol awaits if the U.S. allows for the deregulation of wine distribution.

But there's no reason, constitutional or otherwise, for wholesalers to maintain a death

grip on the movement of booze from one place to another. William Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

Section 2 of the 21st Amendment which repealed prohibition says the following.

The transportation or importation into any state, territory, or possession of the United States

for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors in violation of the laws thereof is hereby prohibited, which means

that every state could regulate alcohol importation, use, delivery as it wanted. And what this resulted in was

protectionist measures so that in-state wholesalers would have to take delivery of any out-of-state liquor shipments

be it wine or anything else and thus in-state liquor wine beer producers were

advantaged over out-of-state producers.

This naturally leads to suggest that there's discrimination and protectionist measures by one state against another

which is not constitutional I mean this is the whole reason behind the Constitution or one of them

is to have a more united country and so that you don't have discriminatory

regulations by one state against another which led to the

case of Granholm versus Head from five years ago.

And the Granholm decision found that in state

and out of state producers of alcohol

have to be treated equally.

That's right.

No state, in this case, the regulations of the states of New York and Michigan were at issue, but no state can treat in and out of state wine producers differently. You can't force out-of-state producers to ship to wholesalers if you don't also

require the in-state ones to do the same thing. So after this decision, there's been a slew of

...