"My daughter/my sister/my daughter/my sister..."

The Economist wonders about the madonna-whore relationship of state controlled liquor sales/regulation and why it lingers in really, really conservative US states:

Selling off state assets at low prices to politically influential businesses isn't really liberal, in either the left-wing or "classical liberal" senses of the word. I'm not entirely sure how liquor-store privatisation aligns on the conservative map, either. Old-fashioned social conservatives may prefer restricted, state-controlled liquor sales. Economic conservatives would prefer to turn the liquor-store business over to private enterprise. Fiscal conservatives, faced with a choice between keeping the ABC stores or raising taxes to replace the lost revenue, may have a hard time deciding. Maybe that's one reason why the discussion of the issue in Virginia seems to be curiously fact-based: nobody can figure out how to treat it demagogically. Then again, I would've said the same thing about cap-and-trade before this year, too.