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.

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.

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