Weekly Writers Round-Up: Craft Breweries, Scooters, and North Korea

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Apply now for the Spring 2020 class!

Another government shutdown threatens to put craft breweries on ice by Christie Pesavento (Summer 2017) in the Washington Times
When the government shut down last December, Americans began to discover just how far the feds’ reach had stretched. From air travel and national park visits to homebuying and mail delivery, people were left wondering how the shutdown would affect them.

One place they may not have expected to find government fingerprints? Craft breweries. And yet during the 2018-19 shutdown, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) — the agency charged with approving all beer, wine and spirit labels before they can be sold across state lines — shuttered its label review operation. As a result, customers eager to try new brews were left wanting, and brewers hoping to sell their latest concoctions out of state were forced to sit on thousands of dollars’ worth of perishable products while the budgetary stalemate lumbered on. Smaller breweries, whose business depends on near-constant innovation, were especially hard hit…

How South Korea and America Should Respond to the Next North Korea Crisis by John Dale Grover (Spring 2019) in the National Interest
The chances for any nuclear or peace deal with North Korea are rapidly dwindling. Kim Jong-un’s end-of-year deadline for a 2019 agreement will likely come and go without any significant progress. Pyongyang has repeatedly announced that its deadline is approaching, insisting that it is up to the United States to break the impasse. However, the question is whether or not North Korea’s rhetoric really means that 2020 will see a return to the norm of inter-Korean tensions accompanied by mutual threats from Pyongyang and Washington…

DC’s dockless scooter decision is bad for consumers but great for Jump and Lyft by Trace Mitchell (Summer 2019) in the Washington Examiner
You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to understand that limits on competition are usually a bad idea. Innovation and entrepreneurship bring fresh ideas, improvements in quality, more options, and lower prices. When governments limit rivalry through regulation, consumers lose these benefits. Unfortunately, the District of Columbia is making this exact mistake by limiting competition among dockless scooter companies.

This month, the District Department of Transportation announced its 2020 Dockless Vehicle Sharing Program, drastically reducing the number of scooter companies allowed to operate within its jurisdiction. Eight companies participated in the 2019 program, but out of the 19 companies that applied for 2020, only four were approved…