Megan McArdle reminds us just how evil our own government can be at times (and she's not talking about the TSA):
I've read a lot about prohibition, but I never read about the government's deliberate effort to make industrial alcohol undrinkably poisonous. Thousands of people seem to have died as a result.
... We pass a law with the best of intentions, and find it doesn't work, and so we pass new regulations and policies designed to crack down on non-compliance, until we are brutalizing the population all out of proportion to the original good we were pursuing.
Drug laws anyone? Immigration? Gun laws? Prostitution?
When you make something illegal and people don't feel morally obligated to stop, you have to work very, very hard with your punishments to get them to do so.
Comments