Thoughts on the PR Government's proposed late-night alcohol ban

The Puerto Rican government, under governor Luis Fortuño, is proposing a new law that prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages from midnight to 6 a.m. This applies to all businesses except for officially designated hotels by the tourism board. Their reasoning is that there are many crimes perpetrated during these hours, and by banning the sale of alcohol, crime will decrease. There are so many things wrong with this proposal that it makes my mind reel.

• First of all, the government (which has no money) would actually lose money from this legislation. They have a tax on alcohol so by lowering the sales they’d be missing out on potential income to help the dire financial situation they’re in.
• Their hypothesis that by not selling alcohol, crime will lower is completely unproven. This might even provoke an inverse scenario where people will resort to illegal means to get alcohol at that hour, turning a once normal process into an illegal drug deal.
• Small businesses are the big losers here. The local bar will lose potential sales and income, driving one more nail in the coffin of the small business being replaced by large corporations.
• Of course, you can still go to a hotel’s bar to buy your alcohol (at a premium price since it’s a hotel). Likely of no benefit to the Puerto Rican economy, since most large hotels are owned by foreign investors/corporations.

Don’t worry though, they really know what they’re doing. They’ve got empirical data to back up their reasoning! The police superintendent claims that because 142 of 609 homicides committed this year have occurred from 12:00-6:00 a.m., this law will help bring down that number. Let’s do some quick math here: 12:00-6:00 is 6 hours, 24 hours in a day, that’s 6/24 = 25%. For the homicides 142/609 = 23.3%. That means that 23.3% of homicides occur in 25% of the day. With the power of logic we can determine that those late night hours are not the hours with the most homicides. This renders their reasoning as unfounded and illogical. Good job sirs!

As we can see, the government loses money on this, small businesses lose money on this, people are stripped of their freedoms, and crime is largely  undeterred by this. Who the hell came up with this, and who is it benefiting? Apparently, there are still sane people working for the government, and the Hacienda agency requested that the law first be implemented in a temporary state to gauge it’s effect on the government’s income. They’re not questioning the actual validity of the proposed law, but it comforts me that at least someone there has the power of reason and organized thought.