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.

ProhicrashAmazon

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)

Three dollars on Amazon Kindle

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.

 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1987 Crash: Naming Names

Image
What happened after a Republican fanatic was reelected, 1986. Reagan Speech : There've been some real champions in the battle to get this legislation through Congress: Senators Bob Dole , Robert Byrd, and Strom Thurmond ; Congressmen Bob Michel, Jim Wright , Benjamin Gilman, Charles Rangel, and Jerry Lewis. I'd like to single out Senator Paula Hawkins in particular. She took this battle to the public and has been a driving force behind the effort to rid our society of drug abuse. Like Nancy, she made her commitment to fighting drugs long before it was the popular thing to do. This kind of honest, hard-working leadership is what makes all the difference. And now, Paula, if you and your colleagues will join Nancy and me, we will get on with the signing of that bill, making it the law of the land.  Here are the names given "it," "the" law of the land.  Signed by President . 10/27/1986: Became Public Law No: 99-570. TITLE(S): (italics indicate a title for ...
Read more

Prohibition, Financial Crisis, WAR

Image
  Who was Germany's ally in WW1? (Amounts in kilos) If you guessed Turkey , you identified the German ally These United States exempted from a declaration of war in 1917 and shielded from accountability for genocidal extermination of Armenians. The graph does NOT tell you that the 14.1 tonnes of opium China shipped to Germany in 1912 came in large part from confiscated shipments after the 1911 revolt that ousted the Qing Empire and ended foreign dumping of opiates. Prohibition zealots are good at eliding inconvenient facts, but to understand how prohibition wrecks national economies it helps to understand that the freer the trade, the wealthier the nation. Does that mean that adding coercive meddling via deadly force impoverishes an economy? Let's find out.  My government-mandated History classes at UTexas thrilled at the showdown between banker Nicholas Biddle and President Andrew Jackson over the primitive national bank and were given to understand the Panic of 1837 resul...
Read more

Prohibition laws, the 1987 Crash and Recession

Image
Bush notices the difference between his prohibitionism and freedom of production and trade Ronald Reagan published an autobiography in 2007 bragging about how he and Nancy had seen to it that only people willing to pee into a Drug Czar sample cup could hold jobs in the federal bureaucracy. All others would be fired.  Onto this bandwagon hopped a Texas congressman with ambitious plans to spread enforcement tentacles around the entire planet, invade other countries, choose foreign politicians and assassinate or jail any who balked.  A year after Reagan's biography revealed--bragged about--what had gone on in the hustings, Texas President George W Bush blinked at teevee cameras as the economy crashed around him.  Bush was absolutely baffled that "the market" Reagan, Bush Daddy and he himself had coerced at gunpoint with prohibitionist zeal and faith-based asset-forfeiture highway robbery, had "stopped working." Let's look at the record.  The following materi...
Read more