That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
Section 23 of the National Prohibition Law expanded on the then-popular ideals of a planned economy by force of arms. Many of these ideas are being recycled right now.
SEC. 23. That any person who shall, with intent to effect a sale of liquor, by himself, his employee, servant, or agent, for himself or any person, company or corporation, keep or carry around on his person, or in a vehicle, or other conveyance whatever, or leave in a place for another to secure, any liquor, or who shall travel to solicit, or solicit, or take, or accept orders for the sale, shipment, or delivery of liquor in violation of this title is guilty of a nuisance and may be restrained by injunction, temporary and permanent, from doing or continuing to do any of said acts or things.
In such proceedings it shall not be necessary to show any intention on the part of the accused to continue such violations if the action is brought within sixty days following any such violation of the law.
For removing and selling property in enforcing this Act the officer shall be entitled to charge and receive the same fee as the sheriff of the county; would receive for levying upon and selling property under execution, and for closing the premises and keeping them closed a reasonable sum shall be allowed by the court.
Any violation of this title upon any leased premises by the lessee or occupant thereof shall, at the option of the lessor, work a forfeiture of the lease.
* * *
The first paragraph is the overreach one expects from totalitarians. The 18th Amendment empowered the Political State to threaten and coerce for manufacture, sale or transportation. Yet the first law enacted, in advance of the date it could be put over by force, added "keep." Any child understand that to keep is to possess. Indeed, Americans desperate over the impending ruin of the nation's economy came back to contest this overreach--but it was too late. By November 15, 1928, Bert Hoover was elected, the Increased Penalties Act was being written up, murder victim Arnold Rothstein's drug empire was revealed and liquor millionaires like Terry Druggan and William Harr of Georgia had been indicted for income tax evasion. The steel trap was again closing around America's ankle, as in 1920, but this time with the Bill of Rights a dead letter and the NY and Chicago stock markets showing record losses at record volume of trading.
The Volstead Act is clearly a criminal law, with chain-gang prison terms and confiscatory fines, yet the second part of title 23 waives normal jurisprudence stare decisis requirements for criminal indictments.
Just as nowadays legalized thugs may confiscate your money, goods, auto and home without bothering to file charges, way back then in 1919 the legal language was already in place... recycled from the Civil War income and property tax so ably condemned by Lysander Spooner in "No Treason." That tax, by the way, was published under another forbidding bartenders to serve liquor to soldiers, many of whom, in Washington DC, were black. The next paragraph reinforces the Civil War tax precedent by deputizing privateers as robbers and murderers with instructions to loot, kill if resisted, and help themselves to an extra share for their troubles.(link) Asset forfeiture was the primary cause of the 1929 Crash and Depression, the 1987 Crash and recession, and the Bush Jr. faith-based Crash of 2008. Suicide rates increased all over the world when that 2008 crash hit. Look it up in the charts.(link)
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
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)
Typical drug manufactures chart, 1930 No American schoolbook mentioned the Opium Wars until Brian Inglis published The Opium War in 1976, the election year the Libertarian Party ran its second slate of candidates demanding repeal of drug prohibition laws. The audiobook version is now available.( link ) Brian's other drug book, the Forbidden Game, gives further insights into how prohibitionism developed as a cudgel with which pharma cartels wielded government laws as marketing tools and double-edged weapons once the colonial harnessing of addiction was out of the bag.( link ) The link between the dragooning of political States into marketing tools and weapons of economic warfare is not the sort of thing those political states extoll with pride. Enormous effort goes into disguising the fact made plain by Adam Smith in 1775 that wars prohibiting production and trade necessarily wreck national economies, just as purging the violence of law from trade relations gives rise to the Wealt...
Off with their heads! Qing prohibitionism On the 17th of January, 1929 , the League Of Nations' coryphaeus of opium prohibitionism met in Geneva to deliberate on the initiation of deadly force in furtherance of prohibitions outlawing production and trade. On September 2, this Opium Advisory Committee recommended that the League organize gangs to kill, imprison and confiscate throughout the entire planet, as the Republicans had done in the USA. As of March 2, 1929, beer and wine made one liable to five years in jail and a fine of about 14 pounds of gold.( link ) Stock markets shriveled and interest rates climbed steeply. All that remained was for Europe to withdraw investments from the USA, as England had done when China, in December of 1836, invited the East India Company opium dealers to leave. Germany--the world's premier heroin producer even before the First World War--stood threatened by the Christian fascism of compulsory abstinence. Japan was the only Asian cou...
The blue line is unemployment, grey bars recessions. We now examine 1980-1990. On 19 February 1980, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs decided to ask all governments to implement to the fullest extent possible sweeping countermeasures against drugs declared illegal, and recommended crackdowns: 3 (XXVIII) ... on financial assets and transactions related to illicit traffic … and subsidized equipment and technical assistance to prohibitionist countries.( link ) The muckraking journalists on 60 Minutes--who stirred national panic after a TMI reactor malfunction injured no one--promptly fanned hysteria against Bolivian plant drugs neither habit-forming nor addictive.( link ) The recession in 1980--like the Great Depression caused in part by League of Nations prohibitionism--is thus clearly discernible in the first quarter of 1980. Inflation went to 13%, then 15% and the San Francisco Fed presented an unconvincing theory reminiscent of Herbert Hoover's "explanation" of the...
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