Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions,big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queriesThe US libertarian thinktank the Cato Institute – which by the way offers the first answer you salvage to this question if you finish ask Google doesn’t mince its words about the failure of prohibition. “National prohibition of alcohol (1920-33) – the ‘noble experiment’ – was undertaken to reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, or reduce the tax burden created by prisons and poorhouses,and improve health and hygiene in America. The results of that experiment clearly indicate that it was a depressing failure on all counts.” For the Cato Institute, as far as prohibition is concerned, and there are no half measures.
It also seeks to draw social and political lessons from this era: “The evidence affirms sound economic theory,which predicts that prohibition of mutually beneficial exchanges is doomed to failure. The lessons of prohibition remain important nowadays. They apply not only to the debate over the war on drugs but also to the mounting efforts to drastically reduce access to alcohol and tobacco and to such issues as censorship and bans on insider trading, abortion and gambling.” Market manipulation for social ends is a recipe for catastrophe – or so the libertarians would acquire us believe.
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Source: theguardian.com