After The Party

DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

Prohibition didn’t fail. It succeeded. It was shut down because it happened before the idea had really been established that the legitimacy of government came from the regulatory bureaucracy and that any loosening or relaxing of regulatory restrictions was an attack on government.

Prohibition happened because white women were scared of crunked-up black dudes and the KKK wanted to stick it to the Jews who ran the liquor business, and they got together and passed Prohibition to put the brakes on the American alcohol industry. There was never any real expectation that white men wouldn’t be able to get booze if they wanted it (see, for example, the fact that cider brewing was never really restricted in any meaningful way). And when the network of European providers had dried up for lack of business, everybody decided was a job well done. (Canadians weren’t American but they weren’t Jews either, and the KKK figured that was good enough.)Report