The Over-Reach of the Moral Absolutists

I have been watching Ken Burns's new documentary on Prohibition. One lesson that struck me was that Prohibition was a classic case of over-reaching by moralists.

Alcohol consumption was a serious problem in this country. But the moralists took the position that they could just ban alcohol and everyone would fall into line. They were so wrong.

But what if they had not been so absolute. The 18th Amendment prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages. The Volstead Act wrote that into law as anything over 0.5% alcohol. But what if they had written the Volstead Act, from the start, to only outlaw hard liquor? What if they had continued to make the sale of beer and wine legal?

I imagine if they had, that Prohibition would still be with us, in some form or another. The 18th Amendment might have hung on, at least for many more years.

But there is still the point of Prohibition, which was that the 18th Amendment was the only amendment to the Constitution that limited freedom. It was a flat-out failure. But that doesn't stop the moralists from proposing other amendments to force people to live the way that the moralists demand. A wise man said it far better (paraphrasing slightly):

They keep swinging back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that.

But they keep trying. Whether it is the tighty-righty's moves to make sure that nobody in the military has access to porn or the PTC's campaign to make sure nobody says anything remotely foul on television, or trying to force people to attend church, they keep trying to make people "better", as if that'll ever work.

They need to be fought, at every turn. Who the hell do they think they are to tell me what to do? Who the hell do they think they are to tell me who I can marry and who I cannot? Why the hell do they say that it is OK to ruin my body with alcohol, but not with marijuana?

The moralists raised the age of eligibility to buy and consume alcohol in the 1990s, after the "old enough to get drafted, old enough to drink" sentiment wore off. They made having a trace of alcohol in one's blood a crime. But did that slow down drinking by 18-21 year olds? Not in the least and, because drinking is illegal, it encouraged binge drinking. Hell, if you're going to drink and break the law, why not just go get hammered? And kids do.

Let's look at marijuana: Where, in this country, can you not find a place to buy reefer? You can probably find a seller in the Capitol building. For certain, you can buy it on every damn college and high school campus in this country. The only thing that the War on Drugs has done is to make selling weed profitable for organized crime. I submit, Gentle Reader, that if marijuana was made legal that there likely would be fewer users than there are today. Because then, the allure, mystique and romance of doing something that is illegal would be lifted.

The moralists, by using the law to try to force people to conform to their beliefs of how people should conduct their lives, undercut respect for the rule of law. The kids who were drinking and smoking weed, in contravention of the law, grow up to become hedge-fund traders and banksters who are not going to obey the law about ethics or insider trading or such. They learned, early on, that the law is can be stupid and they see nothing wrong with breaking the law.

We've reaping the result.