Did your OP present any facts? I saw some assertions, which may or may not be factual, but you don’t appear to have presented anything to back up those assertions which might compel a reader to accept them as facts.
Your posting/debating style on this board thus far does not amount to a strong recommendation for your assertions to be accepted as factual merely on your say-so.
Word. He’s just not yes and-ing…
When the mob starts shooting up the streeets of Chicago in turf wars over the lucrative trade in counterfeit vaccination certificates, the point you’re trying to make may begin to gain some validity.
It’s a troll monster. It doesn’t have motivation.
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This post should’ve ended the thread by being the perfect answer to the OP whatever the OP’s reason for posting was or wasn’t.
Um, no. I like alcohol a lot and think our laws about it are too strict as they are (in some ways: in others they’re too loose), but everything I’ve seen on the subject suggests that Prohibition ‘worked’ quite well, if by ‘worked’ you mean reduced alcohol consumption. This paper estimates that alcohol consumption by the end of the Prohibition era was 30-40% lower than pre-Prohibition (it was 70% lower at the start and then rose to stabilize at 30% lower) and it’s in line with most of what else I’ve seen. It didn’t much increase until a decade after Prohibition was ended, but that’s to be expected: people who grow up without much exposure to alcohol are going to drink less as adults.
I don’t think stopping people from drinking is the business of the state, but if that’s what you want to do, and you think it’s worth the cost, Prohibition did, kind of, ‘work’. Prohibition was ended at least in part for economic reasons, because the country was in a depression and alcohol represented a potential source of tax revenue.
Prohibition broke the back of heavy working-class and poor drinking, at the expense of spreading much heavier drinking into most classes, where it remained.
Huge alcohol use by one class was worth the Temperance efforts, but Prohibition spread a lower overall level of alcohol use and abuse across the population. Hard to say that it worked in any general sense. Like so many social experiments, it was tried, it messed things around, it left a different situation in its wake… but “worked” takes some selective interpretation.
How else would you define “moron”?
While American consumption rates did drop during Prohibition, before this they were fairly low compared to colonial days. The big drop in consumption happened over the period from 1820-1850. People were serious fucking drunks before then.
I’m not challenging you on that, but can I see a citation?
I don’t think Prohibition was a good idea, but when I say it worked, I mean just that consumption went down.
Precisely. Honestly, although I am no teetotaller, if we could pass a law that would eliminate alcohol from the world without any other negative consequence I’d be all for it. It is undeniable that alcohol consumption has an overall negative effect on society, but it is so ingrained in our society, easily produced, and addictive, that laws banning alcohol were found to be more trouble than they were worth. So, yes, even in the case of alcohol “people being forced to do things if there is a large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” makes sense, it’s just that prohibition didn’t actually create a “large benefit to society and to yours and other peoples health” so we gave it up.
Compulsory vaccination on the other had has a much better ratio of cost to benefit so it makes sense to pursue it.
What the hell happened around 1825?
If they bring a “Cite?” You bring a sock puppet. If they send one of your opinions to a poll, you send one of theirs to the Pit.
We should ban recreational satire.
Better water quality? Imported coffee got cheaper?
One reason for heavy beer consumption in the past was that the water was of such poor quality and sanitation it could make you ill or kill you. The beer was safer to drink. In fact in the definitive case where cholera was proven to be a water-borne disease it was the people drinking water that were ill and dying and the beer drinkers who were healthy.
The cost vs. benefit of banning alcohol isn’t cut and dried, it’s in part a semi-subjective determination that depends on how much you value the benefits (social, economic, recreational etc.) or alcohol vs. how much you weigh the costs. At least some of those ‘costs’ did improve under prohibition. And prohibition was eventually overturned largely for economic reasons (to increase tax revenues) rather than because people looked at the increase in gang activity and decided that the costs were worse than the benefits.
Lyman Beecher started preaching about the evils of booze and co-founded the American Temperance Society.