Leonardo McGregor
Professor Lisa McGill has rewritten history and brings a libertarian perspective to the failed quest of government trying to outlaw liquor and end the side effects of a population blasted on liquor which the United States was fast becoming. McGill gives her version s of this time period where reform against free-market capitalist ventures defeated what was a moral crusade to end the detrimental causes and declines of American civil life.
a professor McGill thinks it was just an attack on the poor without realizing why these people were poor and dependent on help and charity was because of their addiction to cheap alcohol that was so readily available and some profited immensely from the misfortunes and abuse of spirit by many losers in society. it's funny when historians like this Harvard professor think they have all the answers when they were not even around at this time. I'm sure if she was exposed to the innumerous wife beaters and domestic violence fueled from heavy intake of alcohol she might realize a bit why people wanted this product banned. no where in this book does the author mention how alcohol affected the American Indian and made them dumb and so susceptible to European trickery and how they lost their ability at self-suffienceny because of alcohol. she writes a chapter blaming Hoover administration and their increased suppression of illegal alcohol trade while ignoring the increase of two other manufacturing of guns and automobiles for the real reason for increased penal system and incarceration. or does she admit the role and addiction of alcohol and narcotics had on the sudden increase of crime and how there were practical reasons to launch a war on this trade that resulted in so many social ills at the time. This author thinks that are current mass incarceration and war on drugs is a result of prohibition. Her book called "The War On Alcohol" examines the many battles and conflicts both political and confrontational that took place on this debate. she rarely looks at the social problems that abundant alcohol that was not expensive and heavily taxed as government does today had on an uneducated and mass male population in America and her biases throughout this book are clear right away. The professor says it was selective enforcement but fails to see that poor abused this product more as wealthy people had to be sharp and focused with their activities unlike the poor whose addictions to drink caused them to be totally useless and unproductive. She blames the American state and the rise of it as causing prohibition and figures that some populations were targeted and selected more than others. Her only proof on this logic is that immigrants didn't have huge private homes as the old-stock protestants and that getting liquored up and shitfaced was part of catholic society and normal in Ireland and Germany. so the fact that natives, whose country America belonged, wanted to enforce rues and set policy standards for drinking was somehow just them being mean to the poor and black. Saying that this was a war on the poor underestimates that most of this country was made up of poor people so any criminal justice action on a population could be skewed as saying it attacks poor and immigrants. perhaps professor McGill is an anarchist and thinks there should be no laws on the book.
Prohibition failed was because libertarian assholes didn't want to spend in enforcing it and ending the scourge and changing the culture of immigrants who were coming to America and instilling their own cultures and bad habits on the host country. sound familiar? Government may have failed in prohibition as McGirr eventually gets to through the book but government found a new source of tax revenue increasing it through the times and balancing the effect of this illicit trade and establishing new sources to grow. The increase in glorification of criminal activity is another cause of increasing penal state as was modernity that basically said that lynch mob vigilantism was passé but again professor McGill overlooks these facts and necessary of building a modern penal system for a modernizing country. I can't believe this woman is a professor and historian. One of the reasons prohibition failed was the state was too small at the time and they found it more convenient in legalizing it and then regulating what was illegal speakeasies and allowing an urban more mundane drinking business culture to flourish more open and under the eyes of authorities who got their share of business profits and allowances from the manufactures of hard alcohol and beer. Lisa McGill through this book and her conclusion and comparison of the drug war makes her realize that maybe the line of prohibition being a failure experiment for the federal government and reformers wasn't reality.
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