by Paul Jacob

Expensive coffee is my besetting sin. But the hugely successful Starbucks — which I’ve defended before — recently did something so oddly irksome that maybe I’ll get a handle on my occasional vice.

Starbucks offers a debit-card-like “customer card” that allows you to pay for your purchases in advance. Or to give coffee to the Starbucks addicts on your gift list.

This is a great marketing gimmick . . . to which I’ve never succumbed. So I had to read about the controversy from David Boaz of the Cato Institute in an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

A friend of David’s got a card. And he went to Starbucks’s website to get it going. Starbucks offered to “customize” his card with a personalized motto that the website says would make the card “as unique as you are.”

David’s friend chose the motto “Laissez-faire.”

That means “leave us alone.” It’s the living expression of tolerance and lack of regulation, often used in conjunction with free-market capitalism.

Great slogan. I use it. It fits with other ideas of tolerance I have, too, the common, more liberal ones about free speech and such.

Unfortunately, Starbucks wouldn’t print the slogan. It was rejected.

They let plenty of leftist political slogans see printing, but not “laissez-faire”!

It makes me want to leave Starbucks alone.

Hmmm . . . Starbucks has competitors. Maybe I’ll try one.

That’s “laissez-faire.”

Paul Jacob's "Common Sense" is published by the Sam Adams Alliance. Their website can be visited at www.samadamsalliance.org.