Barkeep. It’s time for another round.

Make mine a double, because we’re gonna need to talk about the Alabama Beverage Control Board again. Sigh.

The whole concept is like a hangover. We have a system of state-run liquor stores, set up in the 1930s after Prohibition as a nod to the teetotalers and the temperance movement, that was designed to save souls and sell spirits.

Oh, those ‘30s. They gave us Hitler and the Hindenburg, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the disappearance – hit me again bartender – of Amelia Earhart. And they gave us state stores.

They put Alabama into the liquor business, in dispensaries where the government could decide who bought and sold liquor and how much they could profit. It has been a big ol’ sour mash pit ever since.

So now Sen. Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur, will try to bust it up. Again. Orr told Huntsville TV station WHNT he’ll file a bill, as he has in the past, to do away with Alabama’s ABC stores and privatize the booze business.

"Why are we in the liquor business to start with?" Orr asked the reporter. Which is a good question, one answered in the ‘30s, when temperance unions and their lobbyists – not to mention Methodists and Baptists who saw sin in a bottle if not in Jim Crow -- fretted over the end of Prohibition and what it would mean to a South tempted by liquor.

But now? Is there any further need for government-run distribution in a state with 170 ABC stores with some 600 employees? In a state where liquor taxes are high and beer is both economic development and community reinvestment?

Let’s look at the pros and cons of abolishing all those stores.

Pro: “Why are we in the liquor business to start with?” ABC stores compete with private businesses, with an unfair advantage. It’s downright unAmerican.

Con: If Alabama keeps its state’s elaborate distribution network in place it will be ready for the moment when liquor taxes are not lucrative enough. If the state ever decides to legalize marijuana, what better dispensaries could there be than the ones set up after the legalization of liquor?

Pro: Alabama would save millions of dollars by eliminating the salaries and benefits of hundreds of state employees who work in the state stores. The exact amount of millions remains in dispute.

Con: Hundreds of state employees – Alabamians themselves – would lose their jobs.

Pro: The whole state store structure is supported most prominently by the landlords who hold lucrative leases for ABC storefronts. The board has $12 million in leases this year alone, with many of them long term. That’s who the system benefits most.

Con: I’m trying to think. It’s not working.

Pro: The ABC board deserves no sympathy. This is the bunch that has been known to raise liquor markups to fund its favorite public agencies or entities, in essence taking it on themselves to raise taxes. It puts onerous restrictions on people who try to make and sell wine in Alabama, and has stood in the way of the beer boom. This is a board that – for a minute anyway – demanded that people who wanted to buy cans of beer from breweries or brew pubs sign their names, addresses, birth dates and phone numbers for the ABC record.

Con: Cue the crickets. Chirp. Chirp.

Come on bartenders, give us another shot. This has gone on too long.

The Alabama ABC board is a vestige of a forgotten past, a bureaucracy that oversteps its bounds and a trough for the most connected porkers to get a lot fatter. The time of the ABC store is over. The time for Arthur Orr’s bill has finally come.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.