LIBtranslator: July 2022

Monday, July 25, 2022

Volstead Act Collapse, II-33

Economic collapse & communism everywhere

April Fools' Day, 1932

SEC. 33. After February 1, 1920, the possession of liquors by any person not legally permitted under this title to possess liquor shall be prima facie evidence that such liquor is kept for the purpose of being sold, bartered, exchanged, given away, furnished, or otherwise disposed of in violation of the provisions of this title. Every person legally permitted under this title to have liquor shall report to the commissioner within ten days after the date when the eighteenth amendment of the Constitution of the United States goes into effect, the kind and amount of intoxicating liquors in his possession. But it shall not be unlawful to possess liquors in one’s private dwelling while the same is occupied and used by him as his dwelling only and such liquor need not be reported, provided such liquors are for use only for the personal consumption of the owner thereof and his family residing in such dwelling and of his bona fide guests when entertained by him therein; and the burden of proof shall be upon the possessor in any action concerning the same to prove that such liquor was lawfully acquired, possessed, and used.

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The straw that broke the camel's back, consolidating the stock market Crash and launching the Great Depression was a ruling by Federal Judge Louis Fitzhenry that anyone who bought or possessed a bottle of beer could be sentenced to five years in prison. This interpretation of Volstead Sec. 33 was in light of the Jones Increased Penalties Act signed by Calvin Coolidge 2 days before Herbert Hoover's inauguration.The five in the Jones "Five & Ten" law made practically everything a felony, and by extension, failure to inform the police of a felony made practically all Americans into stool pigeons or felons.

Already in late August the New York Times and 20 other papers had begun publishing prosecutor Mabel Willebrandt's series on how deeply The Inside of Prohibition enforcement wove its tentacles into the penal, tax and banking system. Police, Customs and Prohibition agents turned out to be such superb organizers of profitable mischief that Willebrandt made sure they were required to inform on each other. The 1929 market downturn began as August ended.

Lysander Spooner had ironically observed of the dry laws in Boston 54 years earlier:

One answer is that if the fact that the use of liquors tends to poverty and pauperism be a sufficient reason for prohibiting the sale of them, it is equally a sufficient reason for prohibiting the use of them; for it is the use, and not the sale, that tends to poverty. The seller is, at most, merely an accomplice of the drinker. And it is a rule of law, as well as of reason, that if the principal in any act is not punishable, the accomplice cannot be. --Vices are Not Crimes, XXI

But superstitious hysteria cares little for the restraints of reason and causality. Reality made it explicit that laws making a crime of production and trade are what tend to poverty, with practically every country of Europe, Asia and South America confirming that truth. Neither the use nor sale of anything caused as much poverty as did tax-enforced Prohibition when it unleashed The Great Depression! Judge Fitzhenry blurted out his lamentable decision on 21NOV1929, after the Dow Jones averages had dropped by over a third and a New York banker, two Philadelphia brokers and a grain dealer committed suicide. Then, on 26NOV1929 Judge Fitzhenry was in the news again:

Federal Judge Louis Fitzhenry today issued a statement to correct an opinion handed down yesterday which, he said, either by inadvertent use of a word or by misquotation, conveyed the impression that he held any person knowing of another's possession of liquor to be a felon. (...) "I don't believe I said possession was a felony, but if I did it was incorrect," he said. "However any person witnessing a violation of the Jones Act without reporting it would be a felon."

Anyone can visit online newspaper archives and see that The Crash came as soon as word went out of a huge bank-subsidized liquor and drug smuggling syndicate suffered 35 simultaneous raids from Atlantic City across Long Beach to Montauk Point October 16, then worsened as police, Customs, NY banking department personnel, bankers and tycoons were dragged down by dope, bank fraud and murder cases from the US, to England and Germany as commerce was increasingly made a crime.

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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)

Brazilian blog…

American blog…

Tagged: prohibition, confiscation, asset forfeiture, initiation of force, blackouts, energy crisis, liquidation, liquidity, bankruptcy, Crash, Depression, communism, inviting attack, treason, economic collapse,

Wednesday, July 6, 2022

Volstead Act Totalitarianism, II-32

Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. --Lysander Spooner

SEC. 32. In any affidavit, information, or indictment for the violation of this Act, separate offenses may be united in separate counts and the defendant may be tried on all at one trial and the penalty for all offenses may be imposed. It shall not be necessary in any affidavit, information, or indictment to give the name of the purchaser or to include any defensive negative averments, but it shall be sufficient to state that the act complained of was then and there prohibited and unlawful, but this provision shall not be construed to preclude the trial court from directing the furnishing the defendant a bill of particulars when it deems it proper to do so.

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Following Assistant Attorney-General Mabel Willebrandt's example, prosecutors routinely "stack charges" against a defendant, thus building a very long potential prison sentence if convicted, and then approach the defendant with a "plea deal" that would result in a guaranteed, substantially reduced charge and sentence if the defendant agrees to plead guilty to the reduced offense. By stacking income tax charges onto prohibition cases prosecutors circumvented the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. This last was "the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury."

Mixing revealed faith with the forcible restraint of men leads into the fallacy of equivocation. If innocent vices are wrongly transubstantiated into crimes, then the coercive initiation of force is just as easily distorted into a "right." But it is precisely to protect individual rights--moral claims to freedom of action, rather than to impose barbaric superstitions--that we place the means of coercive enforcement into the hand of government and limit it by law. Otherwise, as Lysander Spooner observed:

...government would be utterly impracticable, if it were to take cognizance of vices and punish them as crimes. Every human being has his or her vices. Nearly all men have a great many. And they are of all kinds—physiological, mental, emotional, religious, social, commercial, industrial, economical, etc., etc. If government is to take cognizance of any of these vices, and punish them as crimes, then, to be consistent, it must take cognizance of all, and punish all impartially.

This Spooner recognized as impossible in 1875, when Comstockist abuses were at their furious peak. Yet this same jurist, so often misquoted and falsely maligned as an anarchist, observed that a healthy distinction between vices and crimes is essential if we are to have a functioning government.

Such a thing as a government formed by voluntary association would never have been thought of if the object proposed had been the punishment of all vices impartially; because nobody wants such an institution, or would voluntarily submit to it. But a government formed by voluntary association for the punishment of all crimes is a reasonable matter; because everybody wants protection for himself against all crimes by others, and also acknowledges the justice of his own punishment, if he commits a crime.

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