Shocking even to fanatics!
Ninety years ago this month Senator Morris Sheppard of fanatically dry Texas designed a law to make buying a beer a felony under the Volstead and Five and Ten laws. This is the politician who wrote the 18th amendment and pushed it with blind disregard for what criminalizing a popular commodity might again do to the U.S. economy. This p 2 Chicago Tribune clipping for October 13, 1929 saw daylight 11 days before Black Thursday.
Dr Arthur J Barton, chairman of the national executive committee of the anti-saloon league of America, tonight said he doubted the constitutionality of Senator Morris Sheppard’s proposed amendment to the prohibition law, which would make the purchaser of intoxicating liquors equally guilty with the seller.
Dr Barton said: “I do not know of any general demand among the dry organizations and leaders for such an amendment. I doubt whether such an amendment would be constitutional, and I fear that the introduction of the amendment at the present time is untimely and unfortunate.”
Dr Barton said it was his opinion that convictions under the proposed amendment would be impossible to obtain.
“A fundamental principle and a specific provision of the constitution of the United States is that no man can be forced to testify when his testimony would incriminate himself,” he said.
Asset forfeiture story same page. The U.S. Treasury gleefully confiscated and sold off automobiles found with any amount of beer or liquor, with no regard for the companies financing the sale of the cars. George Bush Jr’s faith-based fanatics did the same thing with houses in 2006 and 2007, leaving the homebuyer with no place to live and a mortgage bill to pay off. Neither Herbert Hoover nor Waffen Bush had any clue how much money their prohibitionist looting would cause to vanish from the fractional-reserve banks and brokerage firms.
Enforcement murderers protected by law, same page. Senator Millard Tydings accused the feds of covering up 51 murders committed by dry killers during violent prohibition enforcement. This is the same sort of thing practiced today on account of enjoyable plant leaves, and the amount of money involved is likely to be a neat fraction of the Gross National Product. But just as there was a Liberal Party in 1930, there is a Libertarian Party in 2019. Our repeal plank sends a loud and unmistakable message to Washington
For more about how pseudoscience and prohibitionism cause the collapse of fractional-reserve banking systems, see Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929. For the cost of a pint you will understand how pseudoscience warped into cruel fanaticism destroys economies. Live on Amazon Kindle.
Prohibition and The Crash,
on Amazon Kindle in 2 languages
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