December 5, 2014 is evidently the day to celebrate by lifting your glass, as it is the 81st anniversary of the end of “our nation’s failed experiment with alcohol prohibition.”
If you’d like to drink up to that, you can join in here.
Or, for that matter, light up, or shoot-up.
And, should you maybe imbibe a bit too much: throw up.
“Modern-day prohibitionists,” the anti-teetotalers argue, “continue to deny the laws of supply and demand, attempting to control what individuals can choose to put into their own bodies.”
Or, in the case of abortion, remove from their bodies.
Or, in the case of gambling, throw down on the craps table or pull on that stupid arm on the slot machine with the arm that’s attached to their bodies.
“The lessons of Prohibition,” wrote Mark Thornton, Auburn University Assistant Professor of Economics (and therefore he ought to know), “apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to ban abortion and gambling.”
And what might those lessons be?
“The evidence affirms sound economic theory, which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure,” or so says the good professor.
And the mutually beneficial exchange in abortion is what exactly?
To have control over her own body an otherwise mother-to-be, or more accurately being pregnant: a mother-who-is, gets to ‘fix the problem’ – i.e. have killed the separate human being in her body – and thus is no longer ‘enslaved’ to the economic burden a child poses but, thus unencumbered and thus empowered, can rather pursue personal career and professional goals?
And gambling?
What’s “the mutually beneficial exchange” that can be had by a gambling-tax-revenue-dependent (read addicted) local government through its partnership with this predatory industry?
A Sea-Doo.
Lakewood recently ended (at year two) its four-year Gambling Treatment Grant Program and, other than 10 graduates and 13 dropouts and trips to Las Vegas and Orlando ostensibly to learn more about said programs, the grant recipient Lakewood Police Department ended the program and bought a Sea-doo with the money.
Speaking of money, Lakewood gets a lot of it from gambling. Although in declining amounts, hence the recent layoffs.
And the exchange? What’s the exchange rate? To hear cities tell it, there’s no downside. All profit, no problems.
Nobody, relatively speaking, to treat.
No big deal.
Actually, “why is this such a big deal?” was what the mother said “while being arrested for allegedly leaving her 3-year-old son locked in her car for more than eight hours while she gambled in a casino.”
She left her kid locked up while she loosened up. She was drunk. But, per the prof., law of supply and demand and all that. She demanded, the casino supplied.
Hey, to hear the prof tell it, we cannot simply cushion the entire world for the lazy, the stupid and the selfish.
Abandoning children while parents gamble is the price of doing business.
Abandoning children through abortion who might have been, or more accurately who-actually-are, is the price of freedom.
That social, financial and criminal wreckage is left in the wake is a non sequitur.
Especially when “prohibition removes a significant source of tax revenue.”
So say-eth the professor on this drink-to-that-day.
