Seeding Prohibition

"If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go the barrel. Get it off the tree."
--Jim Malone (The Untouchables)

Have been slowly chewing thru Ken Burns' Prohibition series. It's hard not to shake one's head at the futility of it all, and how little we seem to have learned. Declaring a market illegal will not make it go away. If people want to trade, they will find a way to do so regardless of the 'rules.'

It had always baffled me how the Eighteenth Amendment, an amendment so glaringly out of place in the limited government context of the Constitution, could have ever made its way thru the Article 5 requirements. At the time, the federal government was collecting the majority of its revenue from excise taxes on alchohol. Why would the feds be willing to give this up? Even if the amendment got past a 2/3 vote in Congress, it would have to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.

Yes, there was the temperance movement. But this movement was on and off since before the Civil War. The fits-and-starts nature of the temperance movement suggested that it was unable to harness enough social energy by itself to obtain super-majority type support.

Enter the Progressive Movement. While its origins are often associated with the commencement of the Wilson administration, the Progressive Movement was underway in the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. In fact, it was under the Taft administration that the most anti-freedom amendment of all was passed--the Sixteenth Amendment. The Sixteenth Amendment granted the federal government the power to tax income, a power that the Constitution as originally written prohibitied. The Sixteenth Amendment passed Congress in July 1909 and was ratified in February 1913.

Part 1 of the Burns series cogently argues that ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment (which passed Congress in December 1917 and was ratified in January 1919) would have been much less likely if the Sixteenth Amendment did not precede it. You see, the Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government an alternative source of revenue in the event of a shutdown of the liquor industry.

That was an 'a-ha' for me. Those in favor of national prohibition joined those favoring more government sponsored programs to throw their weight behind a federal income tax law to supplant the federal revenue stream that would be lost if alcohol was banned.

Prohibitionists and Progressives in a quid pro quo.

The Sixteenth Amendment helps explain how the Eighteenth Amendment came to life. And the prospects for the Eighteenth Amendment helps explain how the Sixteenth Amendment came to life.

Social power subsequently tore down the Eighteenth Amendment. We can only hope that history once again will provide some parallel form with the Sixteenth Amendment.