Prohibition Didn’t Create Capone

Weekend Libertarian ^ | June 21, 2011 | B.P. Terpstra

[AustralianConservative]

….But temperance Chicago never created Capone….

To paint Prohibition as a failure is rather simplistic, because it was always a mixed bag. As author Daniel Okrent (no Prohibition lover) explained to Life.com, “People don't realize how much drinking there was in this country before Prohibition. We were awash in booze. In 1830, for example, the per capita consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today -- 90 bottles of booze per year per person over the age of 15. By 1933, drinking was around 70 percent of pre-Prohibition.”

Change isn’t always a straight road. Again, Prohibition was a mixed bag. Jack S. Blocker, Jr, PhD, from the Department of History, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario, explains: “Perhaps the most powerful legacy of National Prohibition is the widely held belief that it did not work. I agree with other historians who have argued that this belief is false: Prohibition did work in lowering per capita consumption. The lowered level of consumption during the quarter century following Repeal, together with the large minority of abstainers, suggests that Prohibition did socialize or maintain a significant portion of the population in temperate or abstemious habits...That is, it was partly successful as a public health innovation. Its political failure is attributable more to a changing context than to characteristics of the innovation itself.”

This is not the message Stossel wants to hear, my guess, but should history be prohibited, to appease libertarian-inspired myths? Another inconvenient truth, noted by Professor Mark H. Moore at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: arrests for public drunkenness “and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.”

[tacticalogic]

Perhaps if libertarians stopped censoring alternative views, the big picture questions and answers would emerge more frequently.

What provoked that?

[tacticalogic]

duh
follow the $ trail

So, where was the money in passing it in the first place?

[MV=PY]

When booze is outlawed, only outlaws will drink booze.

[hoosierham]

Circular labeling and reasoning there.

Prohibition was just an example of social engineering that did more bad than good until the American people finally ended it.

[katana]

Respectfully, I don't think anyone has suggested that people did not drink water in ages past nor that re-hydration is absolutely necessary during and after consuming alcoholic beverages.

My point was two fold: The manufacture and use of beverages containing alcohol predates writing and was so ingrained (pun intended) in the American public that banning its recreational use was futile and resulted in the creation of several criminal empires (including a political one in Massachusetts), and that it was often safer to consume alcoholic beverages than the water that was generally available to people in towns and cities. The same was/is true, by the way, of coffee, tea, and Coca Cola. I travel a lot and in many countries the rule is if it isn't boiled, broiled, fried, peeled, or comes out of a sealed bottle with a label you don't consume it.

The negative aspects of alcohol abuse are certainly clear and also go back into prehistory. But one of the amazing things about "banning" something is that it only puts what's banned under the control and management of people who, by definition, are law breakers, and criminalizing the majority or a large minority of a population is one rather good definition of tyranny.

[ansel12]

Considering the "quality" of the water available in the towns and cities (outbreaks of Typhus and Cholera were not uncommon) hard liquor, ale, beer, and wine were the safe bet to drink. Maybe the author thinks Perrier was around in 1830 or that boiled and distilled water tastes just dandy.

That was inaccurate and silly. You cannot replace fluid replacing drinks with booze.

[katana]

Are you by any chance a general in the US Air Force? Your obsession with our precious bodily fluids is rather disturbing. More seriously, if you did not understand my last message I can't help you.

People have been consuming alcoholic beverages and most of them living to ripe old age for countless centuries. And for most of those centuries water that was not directly from a spring or processed in some way that involves boiling (as in a brewery or distillery, or a tea pot) was chancy to drink. The water from the tap in your house has probably been heavily processed with chlorine (which is itself a poison). I did not say nor mean to say that one could live entirely on booze. Only that those who indulged in moderation were consuming something safer than the unprocessed water that was generally available to them.

[ansel12]

Look you said something stupid and I corrected you, that’s all.
If you don’t know hard work or hard military living, then maybe dehydration has escaped your awareness, and I have watched people with me collapse and even die from problems with their “precious bodily fluids”.

This was stupid.
“Considering the “quality” of the water available in the towns and cities (outbreaks of Typhus and Cholera were not uncommon) hard liquor, ale, beer, and wine were the safe bet to drink. Maybe the author thinks Perrier was around in 1830 or that boiled and distilled water tastes just dandy.”

[AustralianConservative]

“Circular labeling and reasoning there. Prohibition was just an example of social engineering that did more bad than good until the American people finally ended it.”
Sorry, I don’t follow such “reasoning.”

Is anarchy “liberating”? Individuals will have their own views on how many positives and negatives it brought, but censoring history, as professional libertarians so often do is the meaning of circular. It is also a form of engineering.

[AustralianConservative]

“When booze is outlawed, only outlaws will drink booze.”

During the Prohibition period small quantities of booze were legal, if made at home, for example. It was largely a sales issue.

[AustralianConservative]

“What provoked that?”

History! Read How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must), by Ann Coulter. Libertarians have a great reputation for censoring people as well. It’s called projection.

[AustralianConservative]

Can you say censorship? Professional libertarians are good at that. And: Projection? It fascinates me when people seek to censor historians but then they’ll accuse them of revising history when the facts come out. Orwell was right.

[runninglips]

Water, what do you need water for in the AM? The cure for overnight dehydration, more beer..lol

[Melas]

But alcohol wasn’t banned under Prohibition – the sales were. I personally see good and bad parts to Prohibition, but wouldn’t support it for alcohol. That doesn’t mean my opponents are idiotic though.

Uh, no, the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol was prohibited. You couldn't make it, you couldn't sell it, and you couldn't transport it. That pretty much covered all the bases.

[aumrl]

economic necessity

[tacticalogic]

economic necessity

non-sequitur

[aumrl]

also religious ferver
also womens movement

[Emperor Palpatine]

What blood on his hands before prohibition?

Except perhaps for scheming with “Uncle Johnny” to whack their then-boss “Big Jim” Colosimo. In any event, the actual shooter was New York mobster Frankie Yale....no doubt imported for the occasion.

Maybe you should read up on the,(eminently fascinating), history of American organized crime before you make uninformed statements. Incidentally, I am not a libertarian nor do I apologize for criminals or their behavior. But I’ve always found the mob interesting.

Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act, or whatever you wish to call it was an unmitigated disaster and just more proof that one cannot legislate their own particular brand of morality. Not only is doing so very much in the spirit of tyrannical governments and authoritarian statists, but it also flies in the face of Jefferson’s observation that the “government that governs best governs the least.”

[Emperor Palpatine]

"Al Capone was evil."


Not completely. Again your knowledge in this arena is sadly deficient.

Capone, as other mob chieftains in American cities have over the years, often paid the bills for families struggling to make ends meet, anonymously paid hospital bills for people in the Italian neighborhoods of Chicago, and often tipped dirt-poor street-corner newsboys with $100 bills.

During the Depression he opened soup kitchens and shelters for the unemployed and homeless.



Don Alfonso a bad guy? Yep. A ruthless gangster and racketeer who ordered the murders of over a hundred? Without a doubt. But he did have his good points too, I suppose.

[Emperor Palpatine]

This is what actually made the Twenties roar.



The Thompson M1A1, which you could legally buy out of a catalogue in the 1920's.....