Many 13-18 year olds I know have me and most of my age cohort beaten by a wide margin in terms of the maturity we displayed at that age and our awareness at that time of what real life is and what it requires from a citizen of the United States. With my three children I believe a change back to 18 in the drinking age would improve my ability to relate to them as adults at a critical time (newly voting, newly eligible for draft, finally emerging from the K-12 cocoon) when they are exposing themselves to the standards and expectations of the wider world and learning first hand how they measure up.
Pretty much the entire world has a drinking age of 18. It’s the age of adulthood. If nothing else, lowering the age to 18 might go a long way to accepting that our 18 year old’s are adults, and not the perpetual children that we treat them as. It’s no wonder our homes are full of 20-30 year old’s with their failure-to-launch issues.
I’m not saying that drinking will somehow change things for the better, but for God’s sake, let start having them act as the adults.
Finally something Congressman Garrett and I agree on. Lowering the drinking age to 18 makes ample sense. In fact, I would teach kids how to drink responsibly than trying to stop them from drinking. One approach is to think of alcohol as a complement to food rather than something to imbibe on its own. The Mediterranean approach vs. the Northern European. Having said that, I think you are stretching the point when you relate drinking age limits to Nanny Government.
The only reason the several states settled on a drinking age of 21 is through federal government coercion. The gas tax revenue flowing back to a given state after having been collected by the federal government from that state’s own motorists would have been cut off if it failed to raise the drinking age to 21. This fits the larger pattern in terms of how the federal government indirectly obtains desired statutory or regulatory results in various areas in which it is not empowered by the federal Constitution to act. This has always produced an overweight of power concentrated in the hands of the federal government, upsetting the careful balance struck by the framers of the Constitution that we refer to as federalism. This is how state minimum drinking age laws relate to Nanny Government.