The Reason You Prohibit Things

You want less of them. That’s the reason. You may find that it’s too hard to stop people from doing the thing, literally blood, sweat, and tears trying to prosecute people, but that’s a different thing.

We can decide that a pothead doesn’t deserve to rot in prison until he’s dead. Full legalization is a different matter.

Most people are stupid. Better said, most people are simple: if the government says something is OK, they do it if they want to. If it’s illegal, that’s all the coercion most people need to never do whatever it is. As much fun as it would be to play poker with Larry Elder, Neal Boortz, and the ghost of Ayn Rand, the charming belief that most people decide for themselves what is right and wrong regardless of what the government says is the most utopian nonsense ever.

Despite his liberalism, Ken Burns and his friends do the best historical documentaries I’ve ever seen. The one on Prohibition is amazing. William Wheeler, who spearheaded the effort to make alcoholic beverages basically illegal in 1920, was a legitimate religious zealot. To be as fair as I can, those white Anglo-Saxon Protestants did seem to have a serious drinking problem. It didn’t come from nowhere. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded around the same time. Fun fact: Bill W.’s sponsor was a Catholic priest. The seculars who claim that it’s a conspiracy to smuggle in their Christianity are likely right, though I have known a lot of AA participants throughout my life, and they are serious about not coercing people into religious belief.

Any story of Prohibition that’s true at all must inform us about the hypocrisy that was so prevalent at the time that it brought all law into question. Why? Adults are often just big kids. If you tell them they can’t do something, they’ll do it out of spite. On the other hand, the whole episode reflects what happens when you legislate without consent. Without buy-in, as the coaches call it, you can’t actually accomplish anything. Prohibition advocates were not only going against some of their own cultural norms, but trying to impose their norms on whole groups of people with other cultural norms about alcohol. Racism, xenophobia, and religious bigotry are also part of the story. Ironically, alcohol is regulated today more than Wheeler dared to dream.

Abortion is the gravest violation of human rights that has ever occurred. The numbers are staggering, so much so that a retreat to self-serving euphemisms and distractions is to be expected. Take genocide and turbocharge it with capitalism. I might sarcastically say that I found some corporations that leftists love, but this isn’t a time for jokes. We’re headed toward self-annihilation. Anyone who doesn’t say something is complicit.

More than 99 percent of them are completely elective, so I would say that concerns about the bad effects of legislation are valid, but 1 percent valid, at best.

Jason Kettinger is Associate Editor of Open for Business. He writes on politics, sports, faith and more.