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Vaniver comments on Value evolution - Less Wrong Discussion
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"If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel." -- Milton Friedman
Which is mixing up the effect of the drug war with its purpose; the purpose is what matters here. (Why were the Prohibition activists trying to get Prohibition enacted, were their motives moral or economic? What actually happens is beside the point, and undermined by the eventual repeal of Prohibition besides.)
Or are you suggesting that the small-time Mafia (or their more recent equivalents) foresaw the usefulness of Prohibition and the War on Drugs and directly contributed to their coming into existence eg. by bankrolling hardliner candidates? That would be remarkably insightful of them and one wonders how the mafia or cartels solved the public goods problem this represents...
Corrupt city machines used control of liquor licenses and related bribes to great effect, and found prohibition and other hardline restrictions useful because they made discretion more valuable (and allowed harsher measures against opponents). For example, Roosevelt was engaged in a war against New York City's alcohol legislation as a police commissioner (because it was the largest cause of police corruption he was fighting) in 1895, about a generation before Prohibition passed nationwide.
That's very interesting, but corrupt city machines don't gain revenue from liquor licenses if all licenses or consumption of any kind are banned, which leaves only bribery of police as a possible source; do you have any reason to believe the nation-wide movement to push through an entire Constitutional amendment, which succeeded in 46 of the 48 states, was even slightly assisted by the interest of would-be corrupt policemen?
(Personally, if I were trying to explain Prohibition as a purely economic or rent-seeking phenomenon, consistent with OP, I'd be looking at anti-German and anti-beer sentiment rather than corrupt policemen...)
This is not quite an accurate picture of prohibition in the US - there were religious exemptions, for instance, and I expect producers had to be licensed. I know there was a cap on the acreage of vineyards put towards sacramental wine (which seems a plausible feature of a regulatory apparatus that might involve licensing).
Where do you think you buy employment as a policeman?
I suspect it was mostly pushed by identity voters who didn't know how things would turn out, but I imagine that the eyes of clever gangsters and corrupt policemen all lit up when they heard about it. I suspect that they put little effort into opposing it, which could count as assistance. If any of them did support it, I imagine it was as secretly as they could manage, and thus it might be difficult for us to know about even now.
Minor bit of historical non-trivia here: The Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, before "One man, one vote." At the time, the US still had a "rotten borrough" problem, and furthermore, the average "wet" district had far more people in it than the average "dry" district. Prohibition passed in spite of the fact that a majority of voting-age citizens probably opposed it.