Volstead Act Totalitarianism II, 21

 

Cop gangs after 10 years

SEC. 21. Any room, house, building, boat, vehicle, structure, or place where intoxicating liquor is manufactured, sold, kept, or bartered in violation of this title, and all intoxicating liquor and property kept and used in maintaining the same, is hereby declared to be a common nuisance, and any person who maintains such a common nuisance shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be fined not more than $1,000 or be imprisoned for not more than one year, or both. If a person has knowledge or reason to believe that his room, house, building, boat, vehicle, structure, or place is occupied or used for the manufacture or sale of liquor contrary to the provision of this title, and suffers the same to be so occupied or used, such room, house, building, boat, vehicle, structure, or place shall be subject to a lien for and may be sold to pay all fines and costs assessed against the person guilty of such nuisance for such violation, and any such lien may be enforced by action in any court having jurisdiction.

*** 

Here again is the asset forfeiture that crashed the U.S. economy in 1920-23, and again in 1929-33. Flanking it are cop mobs, which led the courts to strangle the 4th and 5th Amendments of the Bill of Rights and add laws to force crooked government agents to snitch on each other. H.L. Mencken explained the process in 1922: 

[T]he great majority of Americans had not been taking the thing seriously — because they had been caught unawares by the extraordinarily drastic provisions of the Volstead Enforcement Act. The instant they realized what was upon them they applied the national ingenuity and the national talent for corruption to the problem, and in six months it was solved. On the one hand they devised a great multitude of schemes for circumventing the law; on the other hand they proceeded gallantly to the business of debauching the officers sworn to enforce it. Since then there has been a continuous struggle between guns and armament, with guns gradually drawing into the lead. No man, not even the most romantic Prohibitionist, argues that there is anything remotely resembling a general enforcement of Prohibition today. And no unbiased and reflective man, so far as I know, sees the slightest sign that it will ever be enforced hereafter.

Get the complete story in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us

 

Clarity isn't oversimplification.

Tagged: 18th Amendment, altruism, collapse, Constitution, libertarian, political clout, prohibition, pseudoscience, repeal, spoiler votes, superstition, totalitarianism, Volstead Act, war

Volstead Act Totalitarianism II, 18-20

 

H.L. Mencken, The Perihelion of Prohibition (link)

SEC. 18. It shall be unlawful to advertise, manufacture, sell, or possess for sale any utensil, contrivance, machine, preparation, compound, tablet, substance, formula direction, or recipe advertised, designed, or intended for use in the unlawful manufacture of intoxicating liquor.

SEC. 19. No person shall solicit or receive, nor knowingly permit his employee to solicit or receive, from any person any order for liquor or give any information of how liquor may be obtained in violation of this act.

SEC. 20. Any person who shall be injured in person, property, means of support, or otherwise by any intoxicated person, or by reason of the intoxication of any person, whether resulting in his death or not, shall have a right of action against any person who shall, by unlawfully selling to or unlawfully assisting in procuring liquor for such intoxicated person, have caused or contributed to such intoxication, and in any such actions such person shall have a right to recover actual and exemplary damages. In case of the death of either party, the action or right of action given by this section shall survive to or against his or her executor or administrator, and the amounts so recovered by either wife or child shall be his or her sole and separate property. In any case where parents shall be entitled to such damages, either the father or mother may sue alone therefore, but recovery by one of such parties shall be a bar to suit brought by the other.

* * *

Section 18 plainly tramples the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights and repeats the Republican crime against freedom of speech contained in the Comstock Law of 1873.(link)  A mother  in 1873 and into the 1920s could spend 10 years on a chain gang and be burdened by debt for life for explaining to a daughter how to avoid becoming pregnant. Likewise any explanation of how to add water, yeast and canned malt flavoring to glucose corn syrup to produce homemade beer was banned, censored, cancelled, illegal Haight speech! President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Prohibition law and was overridden by a Republican Senate.(link) 

Section 19 repeats and reinforces a gag order to replace free speech, down to the giving of directions as to how to find someplace offering a product they want to folks willing and able to pay for it. This law, written to coincide with the anarchistic communist revolution that engulfed dry, Czarist Russia, is the outlawing of trade and production in favor of a coercively planned economy.

A right is a moral claim to freedom of action. A right is not a moral claim to the life, property, effort, goods--nor license to rob, threaten and coerce--another individual.  Yet Section 20 said the opposite. This section has survived the 21st Amendment to spawn a series of life-threatening usurpations justified by pseudoscientific ignorance of substances way safer than alcohol. All asset forfeiture laws--the laws that caused crashes, recessions and depressions in 1920-23, 1929-36, 1971-72, 1986-92 and 2008-12--plus the Flash Crashes of 2010 and 2015--sprout from Section 20 of the Volstead Act. 

Get the complete story in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us

 

Clarity isn't oversimplification.

Volstead Act totalitarianism, II: 16-17

 

Bad Laws Make Hard Cases... (link)

SEC. 16. It shall be unlawful to give to any carrier or any officer, agent, or person acting or assuming to act for such carrier an order requiring the delivery to any person of any liquor or package containing liquor consigned to, or purporting or claimed to be consigned to a person, when the purpose of the order is to enable any person not an actual bona fide consignee to obtain such liquor.

SEC. 17. It shall be unlawful to advertise anywhere, or by any means or method, liquor, or the manufacture, sale, keeping for sale or furnishing of the same, or where, how, from whom, or at what price the same may be obtained. No one shall permit any sign or billboard containing such advertisement to remain upon one’s premises.

But nothing herein shall prohibit manufacturers and wholesale druggists holding permits to sell liquor from furnishing price lists, with description of liquor for sale, to persons permitted to purchase liquor, or from advertising alcohol in business publications or trade journals circulating generally among manufacturers of lawful alcoholic perfumes, toilet preparations, flavoring extracts, medicinal preparations, and like articles: Provided, however, That nothing in  this Act or in the Act making appropriations for the Post Office Department, approved March 3, 1917 (Thirty-ninth Statutes at Large, Part 1, page 1058, et seq.), shall apply to newspapers published in foreign countries when mailed to this country.

* * * 

Section 16 is the return of Republican Party Comstockism.(link) Puritanical fanaticism enveloped New York in the shape of book-burning societies on the warpath against "articles of immoral use." The Society for the Suppression of Vice actually depicted book-burning and incarceration of non-aggressors as heroic, and in the financial crash year of 1873 its myrmidons swarmed over any and every word in print that might allow women to exercise choice in matters of pregnancy.(link)  Government control over trade and production had by 1920 again included the posting of letters and shipment of packages, albeit with lesser penalties than ten years on a chain gang. The ban on shipping cases of liquor made the mailing of envelopes containing barbiturates, morphine and even stimulants much more lucrative. This, like mailing the address of a nearby speakeasy, had already been banned by the Harrison Act--a law passed largely out of fear that African-americans might be transformed into bulletproof monsters brutally outraging white womanhood.(link) 

Section 17 is another direct assault on the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." This wartime excess repeated Reconstruction-era Comstockist interference with communications and speech, only now with Constitutional sanction. Here is a case of a predatory faction gaining control over the coercive mechanisms of a Political State and then demanding--not earning--obedience, obeisance. Outlawry is a response meaning that the oppressive oligopoly--not the outraged population--is wrong, evil, socially dangerous.

And yet, the explanatory paragraph weakens the censorship somewhat and allows a glimpse behind the mercantilist curtain at the crony alliance paying the pelf and boodling the votes. Censoring foreign newspapers at a time when American troops struggled under fire from godless communist anarchism in Vladivostok would have been a bit too obviously the work of a totalitarian planned economy.(link) Then, too, there were entrenched lobbyists and connected pressure groups to contend with. It would hardly do for the public to realize that the Glucose Trust was the financial backer of dry prohibitionism.(link) That cartel's legal agenda was opposed most vehemently by brewing and distilling interests which split, then attacked each other like starving curs. Overt marketing of ethanol was thereby torpedoed and the dry progressive alliance of idealistic socialists and programmable mystical Trilbys--drunk on the power of the Pure Food Law--caused the Panic of 1907. Is it not enough to make you wonder what Machiavellian manipulators owned the Glucose Trust?

* * * 

Get the complete story in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or amigra.us

 

Clarity isn't oversimplification.