Also, he's proposed relaxing the license cap over time, which will stop current ones from becoming worthless. You can imagine that if anyone paid a million for one today and tomorrow they said "lol actually anyone can sell booze", it'd immediately be worthless and they'd be out the full amount.

But its value is essentially in government-mandated lack of competition, driving up prices for all of us, and if competition is allowed to ramp up slowly then they'll still capture benefits of having the license, slowly decreasing each year. It'll be worth less than they anticipated, but not necessarily by a ton (if it were phased out over, say, 30 years). The tax credit could hopefully make up the difference relatively cheaply.

That said, yeah it's pretty terrible and causing a great deal more loss for the whole state to maintain this system than it would cause to the restaurateurs or whoever to tear it down. I'm for moving fast, breaking things, and maybe offering partial compensation to the current cartel beneficiaries.