Now Those Foreigners Are Trying to Take Our Beer!

Someone allegedly named "G. Tracy Mehan, III" at The American Spectator laments, for purely sentimental reasons, the possibility that a Belgian conglomerate might purchase Anheuser-Busch.

I believe in free markets, free trade, creative destruction, fierce business competition, and shareholder value.

I also believe in my hometown company, Anheuser-Busch. I believe in family business, local institutions, free beer on brewery tours, Clydesdale draft horses, and Grant's Farm, the Busch family estate with an authentic (or close enough) Bavarian Bauernhof stable and courtyard with little motorized trams to cart you around....

My high degree of angst is caused by the $46 billion (that's with a "b") tender offer by the Belgian brewer, InBev, to buy out St. Louis's trademark business which, for the moment, has been rejected by the brewery's board of directors. In countless churches throughout the city, worshipers pray, devoutly, that this is just not a negotiating tactic in quest of a more generous offer. Just say no!

This proposed transaction puts my economic principles at odds with my sense of rootedness in time and place.