The Law and the busybodies

Today marks the anniversary of the end, in 1933, of Prohibition in the United States.

Prohibition seems daft now, but the anniversary is significant for a number of reasons. The first is that this was not just a law, it was a part of the Constitution. People who want a constitution in the UK (of course we already have one, I mean people who want a codified model you can buy in newsagents), forget that you can put lots of silly stuff into a constitution (and I bet we would) and then change it, as the Americans did an astonishing fourteen years later. Constitutional amendments are only different from ordinary laws in that you need a bigger majority in the legislature to enact or amend them.

The second reason all this is worth thinking about is that, following the ridicule with which this sort of thing is now viewed, the busybodies (and what must they have been like in 1919 to enact this!) are using a different method to get their way. Look at smoking: first they tax it, so heavily that it is a burden on the poor, not the rich; then they come up with a lot of bogus statistics about passive smoking (and this is an episode for which Science should hang its head in shame) to ban it from stations, public buildings and so on. They are passing the Prohibition Amendment (it was called at the time ‘The Noble Experiment’!) by stealth.

Who can doubt that what has happened to cigarettes will happen to alcohol unless the busybodies are stopped?

Laws should be made by the people, working upwards through their representatives, not by the great and good looking down on the people, knowing what is best for them.