Time to End the Second Prohibition
by Charles Glass
by Charles Glass
 Salvation
was in the air. Repeal, also, was in the air. Two weeks before,
the lame-duck Congress had turned a somersault and voted the amendment
to the Constitution ending Prohibition. The wets were making merry
with applejack, bathtub gin and prohibition hooch. “Beer by
Easter,” they cried. Forty-one legislatures were in session
for the chance to approve the wet amendment and to slap taxes on
beer and liquor to save their empty treasuries… The country,
the states, the towns needed money – something to tax. And
liquor was the richest target. “Revenue,” said one commentator,
“unlocked the gates for Gambrinus [beer’s patron saint]
and his foaming steed.”
~ John T. Flynn,
writing about the eve of Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration
in March 1933 in The
Roosevelt Myth
 America’s
First Prohibition, on alcohol, ended in 1933, not because it failed
– although it most certainly had. Not because the murder rate
in America’s cities doubled during 13 years of the “noble
experiment.” Not because the enforcement of a law that attempted
to prevent people from doing what they went on doing anyway had
corrupted the police, courts, legislatures and businesses of the
nation. Not because Prohibition handed a share of the economy to
a criminal underworld that grew richer than U.S. Steel without paying
a penny in tax. Nor because the federal prison population swelled
by more than five hundred per cent to accommodate all those who
were caught (a small percentage of the offending total) producing,
importing, selling and drinking the devil’s liquid.
No, it ended
because the Great Crash of 1929, the banking crisis that followed,
the loss of tax revenues from business that had gone bust and millions
of workers without jobs made it too expensive. The Great Depression
killed Prohibition, because the United States just couldn’t
afford it.
When Barack
Hussein Obama assumes office on January 20th, he should remember
the precedent his party set in 1933 and end the Second Prohibition,
on drugs. This will create an immediate tax windfall to give the
Treasury back more than it lost on Iraq, the bank bailouts and the
annual subsidy to Israel. It would also relieve the American taxpayer
of the burden of enforcing laws that Pew Center on the States’
Public Performance Project estimated
[pdf] cost federal and state governments $20 billion a year.
Not a bad savings, when times are tough, especially when the so-called
“war on drugs” is failing as surely as the crusade against
alcohol did 80 years ago.
Read
the rest of the article
January
8, 2009
Charles
Glass [send him mail]
is the author, most recently, of The
Northern Front. See his
website.
Copyright
© 2009 by Taki's Magazine
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