{"id":378,"date":"2012-07-07T16:32:34","date_gmt":"2012-07-07T16:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=378"},"modified":"2014-02-09T05:25:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T05:25:40","slug":"prohibition-bootleggers-baptists-bandits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2012\/07\/prohibition-bootleggers-baptists-bandits\/","title":{"rendered":"Prohibition: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bandits – Article by Sanford Ikeda"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Sanford Ikeda
\n<\/big><\/big><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
July 7, 2012<\/big><\/span><\/div>\n
Recommend this page<\/a>.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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The political economist Bruce Yandle<\/a>\u2019s phrase \u201cbootleggers and Baptists\u201d captures the idea that special-interest groups with conflicting moral positions often find common cause in particular government interventions.\u00a0 Many on the political left agree with crony capitalists that government should make taxpayers bailout some businesses that are \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d; some radical feminists agree with some Christian fundamentalists that government should ban pornography.\u00a0 Their reasons are different but the policies they support are the same.<\/p>\n

Bootleggers and Baptists<\/strong><\/p>\n

The inspiration for \u201cbootleggers and Baptists\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(pdf) comes directly from the diverse support that so-called \u201cblue laws\u201d<\/a> have historically received.\u00a0 According to Yandle,<\/p>\n

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Bootleggers . . . support Sunday closing laws that shut down all the local bars and liquor stores [because they increase the demand for illegal hooch].\u00a0 Baptists support the same laws and lobby vigorously for them [because they believe drinking on Sunday is wrong].<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course the story behind Prohibition era<\/a> in the United States, marked by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920-33), is this lesson writ large. \u00a0Banning the sale of liquor, whatever it did to deter drinking, did wonders for promoting organized crime, which had (and still has) a comparative advantage over law-abiding people in supplying and demanding illegal goods. By clamping down on a product in such high demand, local and national governments (including the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also prospered during Prohibition) spurred mob activity, intentionally or not, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York.<\/p>\n

Ken Burns: No Eighteenth Amendment without the Sixteenth<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I hadn\u2019t realized until I saw Ken Burns\u2019s excellent documentary \u201cProhibition\u201d<\/a> is that an important and, I think, less-known connection existed between the anti-liquor lobby\u2013which included among others the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) and the Women\u2019s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)\u2013and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.\u00a0 That amendment gave Congress in 1913 the power<\/p>\n

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to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(The Supreme Court had ruled<\/a> an earlier income tax law unconstitutional in 1895.)<\/p>\n

In an earlier FreemanOnline column, Don Boudreaux explained<\/a> why Prohibition was repealed after only a dozen or so years.\u00a0 In short the inability to tax liquor, now illegal, along with the onset of the Great Depression, had a devastating impact on government tax revenues.\u00a0 My focus is on the alliance between anti-liquor forces on the right, pressing for prohibition, and Progressives on the left<\/a>, pressing for an income tax.<\/p>\n

Now, according to one source<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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By 1868, the main source of Government revenue derived from liquor and tobacco taxes. . . . From 1868 to 1913, almost 90 percent of all revenue was collected from . . . excises.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a significant source of taxes, without which the government could hardly operate, let alone grow to the size needed to implement the Progressives\u2019 agenda: making government more efficient in order to run society along \u201crational\u201d principles. \u00a0Government programs to improve schools, health care, and industry need a steady funding source, and without liquor taxes intervention could not go far enough.\u00a0 So no matter how hard prohibitionists argued, marched, and lobbied, and no matter how sympathetic government officials may have been to their cause, they would never dream of sacrificing their cash cow on the alter of idealism\u2013at least not without an equally reliable alternative.<\/p>\n

And that of course led naturally to the social conservatives support of the progressive (in both senses of the word) income tax.\u00a0 The Sixteenth Amendment passed in 1913, opening the way in 1919 for the Eighteenth Amendment.\u00a0 The rest is history.<\/p>\n

Baptists and Bandits<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not arguing that the alliance was primarily responsible for passage of the amendment, but rather that it\u2019s clear the interests of social conservatives and the taxman were perfectly aligned.\u00a0 \u201cBaptists\u201d on the one side, and on the other, those eager to expand the use of aggression to plunder wealth created by trade and to spend it to indulge their own preferences\u2013that is, bandits.<\/p>\n

Sanford Ikeda<\/a> is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of <\/em>The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education<\/a> and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License<\/a>, which requires that credit be given to the author.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sanford Ikeda July 7, 2012 Recommend this page. ****************************** The political economist Bruce Yandle\u2019s phrase \u201cbootleggers and Baptists\u201d captures the idea that special-interest groups with conflicting moral positions often find common cause in particular government interventions.\u00a0 Many on the political left agree with crony capitalists that government should make taxpayers bailout some businesses that are \u201ctoo big to fail\u201d; some radical feminists agree with some Christian fundamentalists that government should ban pornography.\u00a0 Their reasons are different but the policies they…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[907,902,908,901,903,880,913,616,904,18,909,905,84,906,30,59,146,911,912,898,900,899,910],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-alcohol-prohibition","tag-bandits","tag-blue-laws","tag-bootleggers","tag-bruce-yandle","tag-conservative","tag-conservatives","tag-constitution","tag-corruption","tag-economy","tag-eighteenth-amendment","tag-excise-tax","tag-freedom","tag-income-tax","tag-libertarian","tag-liberty","tag-morality","tag-progressive","tag-progressives","tag-prohibition","tag-sandy-ikeda","tag-sanford-ikeda","tag-sixteenth-amendment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2124,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/2124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}