Frequent College Insurrection contributor Hans Bader has written a new article for Liberty Unyielding which highlights the effect rape culture has on small businesses.

Small business and consumers harmed by ‘rape culture’ panic

Scheming politicians, opportunists, and grifters have latched on to the recent panic over a supposed campus “rape culture” to clamp down on activities having nothing to do with rape. In some cases, they have imposed regulations that take away consumer choices and harm small businesses.

Never mind that, as Wikipedia recently noted, there has been a steady decline in rape rates for all age groups over the last two decades, according to data “from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics” from “1995 to 2010,” which show a “58%” overall reduction. With enough fear, you can manufacture a crisis, and a crisis gives you “an opportunity to do things . . . you could not do before,” as President Obama’s former chief of staff noted in his famous remarks about not letting a crisis “go to waste.”

As the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson notes, small businesses have suffered from “Maryland’s grain alcohol ban,” passed in the name of preventing sexual assault, which has “tripped up violin restorers, cake pros,” and “craft bitters folk,” judging from a recent Washington Post story. “ At Free State Notes, Olson discussed the spurious campus “‘sexual assault’ rationale” that “is behind the new grain alcohol ban,” and how “tax dollars have enabled” the “crusades” against it that led to the ban. As Michelle Minton noted in the Baltimore Sun in July, “Maryland banned high-proof liquors like Everclear and other inexpensive tipples” after activists funded by taxpayers (and effectively rewarded for their alarmism) “claimed such ‘high octane’ liquors increased the likelihood of binge-drinking and sexual assaults on college campuses.”

Meanwhile, Columbia University has canceled a popular concert over sexual assault fears. “A popular, twice-a-year concert at Columbia University has been put out to pasture after administrators [worried] that the event was causing sexual assaults at the school. . .The abrupt cancellation will cost the school over $55,000 in payouts . . . to artists scheduled to attend. . . .There had been specific complaints about Bacchanal in the past, with a student penning an op-ed for the school newspaper last spring complaining about alleged sexual harassment that she experienced” at the concert.