Anyone who’s seen The Godfather Part II or HBO’s Boardwalk Empire knows that American Prohibition’s only winner was organized crime. Bootleggers, smugglers, mobsters, hitmen, tax cheats, firearm traffickers, racketeers and all variety of petty criminal made a (sometimes literal) killing. But that actually wasn’t the most insidious part of one of our federal government’s most notorious overreaches.
Between 1920 until 1933, legions of Americans citizens were transformed into minor criminals for having violated – in some form or fashion – the dictates of the Volstead Act. A New York mother of six children by the name of Mary Toia was sentenced to a year-and-a-day in prison for selling booze out of the family home and fined $300 which, for the record, would translated to about $4,500 today when adjusted for inflation. Thousands of citizens including many women living in challenging domestic and/or socioeconomic circumstances met similar fates.
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By 1928? U.S. federal courts heard nearly 60,000 Prohibition cases in a single calendar year!
One of widely-accepted takeaway lessons of Prohibition: legislating private morality on the basis of “the greater good” is a dangerous path to tread.
The COVID-19 experience suggests we’ve collectively forgotten quite a bit over the last century. Consider the case of an Ocean County, New Jersey gym teacher who has been arrested for forging a doctor’s note to… sell prescription drugs? Or advance some other nefarious end?
Nah. She wanted to get out of wearing a mask:
“Gayle Hadley, 53, of Toms River, was arrested on Thursday and charged with one count of uttering and one count of falsifying medical records, according to the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office.
The district flagged the doctor’s note submitted by Hadley to local authorities, which determined the teacher had tried to claim a fake medical exemption from the mask policy earlier this month, prosecutor’s said.”
At least the Volstead Act came about after the passage of a U.S. constitutional amendment, folks. Ms. Hadley stands accused of violating a Murphy Administration executive order of dubious constitutional force. We saw a lot of this last year when residents were charged for violating curfews and throwing house parties… the modern equivalent of a speakeasy.
A Lyndhurst woman recently landed herself in very hot water for allegedly selling fake vaccination cards on social media., a trend which is guaranteed to continue with the advent of Joe Biden’s OSHA vaccine mandate.
Next up in New Jersey: daycare regulations mandating the compulsory masking of toddlers.
The covid-conscious will insist this time is different. Alcohol (with the exception of driving while consuming it) is usually harmless while helping spread a deadly pandemic is a whole different ball of wax. If you want to get into the science of masking, feel free to start here.
Covid karens and their enablers should nevertheless proceed with caution; their predecessors in the temperance movement used very similar arguments in advocating for the prohibition of alcohol. “You will hardly find an instance of degradation, of pauperism, of great crime which has its origin more or less in intemperance” warned one famous piece of period propaganda. Who hasn’t watched a pro-masker scream almost the same thing to an anti-maskers on TikTok in recent days?
History always repeats itself. The question is never “if” but “how long” before the stupidity ends.
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