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•Four Greatest Licences to Print Money 27

The best illustration of the stability of the demand side is the fact that the driv-
ers of prohibition were the evangelical Protestant middle classes who were anti-alien
and anti-Roman Catholic. They held sway in the rural areas of the country and were
generally opposed to the growth of cities and towns. Their attack on liquor was
successful because it was assisted by the rural domination of the state legislatures.

The result of prohibition was that liquor was more or less unknown in these
rural areas, while reasonably obtainable in the towns and cities. The people who
wanted to drink and lost out were the working classes who could not pay the inflated
prices that prohibition had guaranteed.

Successful businessmen in the liquor industry were very successful indeed. Al
Capone counted his annual earnings in tens of millions of dollars. There was a
downside. The gang wars, which accompanied the distribution of liquor, cost a lot
of people their lives. Historians of crime, however, maintain that a stable semi-
monopoly was emerging towards the end of the 1920s.

Also emerging at that time was a new attitude in the temperance movement
itself. Major supporters of prohibition gradually lost faith in it as they saw the in-
crease in criminal liquor production, the development of the speakeasy and the
increased restriction on individual freedom. The Democrats adopted a platform to
repeal the prohibition act in the presidential election of 1932, which they won.

Most states immediately repealed their own laws, but some kept on until 1966.
Since then liquor control in the USA has remained at local level.

Ask yourself

• Is there any way that your product could improve its margins by the slowing
down of supply without any consequent reduction in demand?

Join me in lobbying for the complete prohibition of business books.