Tag Archives: sumptuary law

Pure Food Law Recession

Kill the tax-dodgers

1907 amendment: alcohol excise tax dodgers sentenced to death or blindness without a trial (link)

 A Reason Magazine article on the disputed definition of milk brought to mind the facts behind the Panic of 1907. (link)

The Pure Food Law passed in 1906, three years after the Silent Panic brought on by a Chinese boycott of American products. The boycott–three years after the Boxer Rebellion failed to exclude foreign morphine and needles from prohibitionist China–got the attention of U.S. industrialists and bankers and the mixed-economy politicians they owned and controlled. British baby syrup had Poison, Morphine written on the labels, and that made them comparatively honest and straightforward by Chinese standards. The Pure Food law only became enforceable in 1907, the Year of the Panic. This was the year of a Great Awakening in China, as Draconian measures were afoot in a War on Poppies. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s inherited fortune and guilt came from American participation in selling opium in China. Once promoted by assassination to the Presidency, the former Police Commissioner who had served the Comstockers and Anti-Vice societies as muscle to enforce Sunday closing of New York Saloons set out to put the Teeth into Temperance. Industrial alcohol would be excise-tax-free, provided poison were added to sicken, blind and/or kill any who drink it.

Bureau of Chemistry guru Wiley chose a pharmacopoeia definition of whiskey and wrote a Decision to make it binding.  Countering government chemist Wiley, Attorney‑General Bonaparte differed as to the Revealed definition of “whiskey” and offered his own alternatives: 

The following seem to me appropriate specimen brands or labels for (1) “straight” whisky/whiskey, (2) a mixture of two or more “straight” whiskies, (3) a mixture of “straight” whisky/whiskey and ethyl alcohol, and (4) ethyl alcohol flavored and colored so as to taste, smell, and look like whisky/whiskey.
(1) Semper Idem Whisky/whiskey: A pure, straight whisky/whiskey mellowed by age.
(2) E Pluribus Unum Whisky/whiskey: A blend of pure, straight whiskies with all the merits of each.
(3) Modern Improved Whisky/whiskey: A compound of pure grain distillates, mellow and free from harmful impurities.
(4) Something Better than Whisky/whiskey: An imitation under the pure food law, free from fusel oil and other impurities.  (Other suggestions primly censored as politically unwoke.)

The gauntlet was flung, the challenge accepted, and so began one of many parallel legal battles whose first casualty would be the American banking system and economy. 

She's with Us!

She’s with Us!

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)

Three dollars on Amazon Kindle

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 blog…

Dry Killers, 2020

PERP NOT SHOWN, REDACTED

FEDERAL Prosecutor initiates deadly force against wife, self. (link)

Dry Killers was the term The Chicago Tribune used to describe government agents and their hangers-on who routinely killed unarmed boys and men in the 1920s and 30s. Anyone who thinks this is a prohibition phenomenon that’s over and done with might care to explain today’s news–or news of the past century.

Federal Prohibition and Second Amendment Kristallnacht infringement mouthpiece Timothy Delgado turned up dead just north of Folsom Prison in California, where police say he apparently killed his wife, then himself. Whether the reporting is accurate or not, it is typical of fanatical prohibitionism–which after the complete economic collapse of 1929-1933 shifted from beer, wine and Demon Rum to coercion over plant leaves and their extracts. The other big change is that big shots at the Chicago Tribune had a lot invested in alcohol precursor chemicals during national prohibition. They evidently have no such stake in Post-Nixon avatars of Satan. Fanatics infiltrating federal agencies, on the other hand, most certainly have a serious stake in the initiation of deadly force.(link)

Tribune reporters back then tracked down and reported on every storeowner, housewife and boat operator murdered in cold blood by prohibition agents. Nowadays such events are typically reported only by Reason Magazine writers. Prohibition killings are masked as “resisting arrest” and other such euphemistic camouflage, and a way is in every case found to minimize their impact on public perception. But America was not always so like a Christian National Socialist Democracy.(link)

Chicago was then and is now home to the largest glucose corn sugar plant on planet Earth. Yeast and sugar companies bankrolled bootleggers who installed refinery-grade continuous stills in bankrupt three-story mansions after The Crash. These outfits could afford to repay the political State in its own coin. This actually happened twice. In 1921-22 civilian posse comitatus‘ hunted down killers with badges as the economy collapsed, then a truce was established. The economic effect can be seen in this graph for hops, a precursor plant used to brew Beelzebub’s beer.(link) 

Nullification of felony beer prohibition laws

The 1923 Gentleman’s Agreement shifted enforcement away from beer until March 2, 1929, after which the economy lasted another 6 months

The truce broke down when the Klan defected from the Dems in 1928 and helped elect Herbert Clark Hoover. Prohibition related murders–including the killing of federal agents–immediately filled all the papers, and tell-all éxposé books appeared right after the Crash–itself caused by withdrawals of money from fractional-reserve banks to avoid federal asset-forfeiture confiscation. That is a little-appreciated aspect of a fractional-reserve banking system after a looter takeover. Here is an excerpt from Before and After Prohibition, a 1930 compendium by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings:

ONE of the most shocking results of the ten years of effort to enforce national prohibition is the long record of killings by prohibition and other Federal law enforcement agents. Even among some of the strongest advocates of the “noble experiment,” there have been widespread expressions of revolt at this bloody spectacle. Information regarding many of these killings has occupied much space in the public press, and editorial comment upon them has been most denunciatory. Yet they continue—apparently an almost inevitable accompaniment of the enforcement of this law.

Senator Tydings managed to uncover some 1300 suppressed killings committed by prohibition agents that were kept out of the papers and seldom discussed–including cases of federal gangs gunning down each other! Here’s a fratricidal example from Tydings’ collection: 

George Ball and William Porter, State agents, killed in battle with Federal Revenue officers at Camp Creek, West Virginia, June 20, 1925. (Each band of dry raiders thought the others were bootleggers, and they opened fire simultaneously.)

So this pattern of superstition, pseudoscience and political asset-forfeiture looting requires the initiation of force. This in turn requires killing people so that the law is taken seriously. Who advocates these murders? The answer is politicians who, like Germany’s NSDAP, represent Christian altruism–except for the part about how “thou shalt not kill.”(link) 

Thus, mystical collectivist cheapening of gratuitous murder stimulates demand for revenge and counterexamples, and the sort of agents and prosecutors attracted to this line of work do not even value their own lives, much less those of others. Remember this when next you hear one of God’s Own Prohibitionists seeking to pervert the Constitution and coerce women for “the unborn.” Just as Republican and Democrat prohibition fanatics cannot see “thou shalt not kill” in a book that does not condemn enjoyable substances, just so they cannot grasp “All Persons born” in the U.S. Constitution, or the absence, nay, denial of any federal authority for enactment of sumptuary laws.(link)

Incidentally, Millard Tydings was reelected over and over and served 44 years in the Senate.

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.

Live on Amazon Kindle in 2 languages

Brazilian blog…