Homer vs. Prohibition

0:00It's a pleasure to be here and to have all you here today on this distinguished panel. I must admit, my paper Homer versus Prohibition, this is not a paper about the epic poet from ancient Greece. This is a paper about Homer Simpson of the cartoon TV series The Simpsons. The Homer of Ancient Greece wrote about zealots and stars, military heroes, all that kind of stuff. Homer Simpson is much more of a regular guy, with all the flaws of every people, not the great zealots and religious leaders and the stars and the military heroes of Homer's Epic Writings. Homer Simpson is the representative of what I refer to as the drinking class.

1:06Now Josh Hall is editing a book called Homer Economicus on the economics of the Simpsons and he asked me to write a chapter for that book on a particular episode of the series The Simpsons and the the title of the episode is Homer versus the 18th Amendment or alcohol prohibition in the United States and it's really I'd never seen the show he just knew that I had written a lot about prohibition and wanted me to write one specifically on that this specific show and I couldn't really I thought this is a great opportunity. It provides an excellent illustration.

1:52Like I said, I hadn't seen the show, but when I did, I said, I have to sign up for this project. Overall, the book is meant to be an introduction to free market economics to college students, high schools, senior economics classes, and just everybody can benefit from the book. My paper is actually on the working paper site of the Mises Institute, so if you want to actually get a copy of the paper, and if you wanted to show your class the show, it's only 21 minutes long. I've done it a couple times at Auburn University, and it's worked out great.

2:38Matt Groening, who's the producer and creator of the show, and his writers just did a fabulous job in terms of getting the story right about alcohol prohibition and applying it to Springfield, Illinois and The Simpsons Show. He starts out with reality. He's not starting with perfection. The show opens on St. Patrick's Day in Springfield with Homer and his buddies standing Standing outside of Moe's bar eagerly awaiting Moe to show up so that they can get snuckered all day long on St. Patrick's Day, Moe finally shows up with a large bottle of green beer dye with the skull and crossbone written on it and Homer's friends say, you know, Moe, we've been here for an hour, we're thirsty, we broke in your back door but there was another

4:04Crazy and crawling all over the place. There's a beer cannon in the parade and the beer cannon gets tipped over and the beer starts going up in the air and comes down directly into the mouth of Bart Simpson, who gets drunk and is shown on TV staggering all over the Place on TV, and then this sort of creates an uproar amongst the finer people of Springfield, Illinois. There's a lot of talk about, think about the children, you know, we got to do this for the children's sake. Women sort of go to City Hall and demand that something can be done, representing what in the 1920s was the Women's Christian Temperance Union who advocated for prohibition.

5:00And so this is all sort of, he brings it down to the small level of prohibition in the 1920s here in Springfield, Illinois in a very sped up process. As the discussion goes on, basically he brings into play the Baptist's point of view of alcohol is inherently evil and we must be completely eliminated in order to save society. And while this is taking place, a clerk in town finds an old dusty document that says that Springfield has a prohibition already, that's been in existence for 200 years, it's which has just been forgotten about and so Matt Groening speeds up the story of Prohibition which actually took a half a century in the United States to get from the prohibitionist sentiment in the people, the temperance sentiment turned into a nationwide prohibition.

6:01He does it in 30 seconds. So in the paper basically I look at the promises of Prohibition which is to clean up society to make everybody nice and neat and pretty, clean up corruption, and so forth, and compare that to the reality of prohibition, all the unintended consequences that do take place. In other words, go beyond the sort of simple supply and demand economics of, well, we'll prohibit prohibition, we might not be able to completely eliminate it, but it's going are going to drive up the price and reduce the quantity. We're going to make a better society. The reality is, of course, there's a lot of unintended consequences and The Simpsons Show does a great job of illustrating all those unintended consequences.

6:54The first thing that happened is the owner of Duff's Brewery in town switches to non-alcoholic beer, claiming that his sales are going to go up, his costs are going to go down, he's going to make more money than ever. Thirty seconds later, he goes out of business. Then the mafia shows up. It starts running in beer from the next town over. They drive into town in these armor-plated trucks, careening through the streets, and the mafia boss tosses out money into the police cars. As money lands on the lap of one of the police officers, I don't know, you know, why does the mafia always get such a bad rap?

7:47Moe's Bar, which is normally kind of a laid back, you know, place where they're not really even talking all that much, just a few guys sitting around sipping their beers, is turned into Moe's Pet Shop, which is a speakeasy. It's made to look like a pet shop, but it's It's actually a jazz bar and instead of the laid back old Moe's bar, it's got a big jazz band and the waitresses are all in burlesque costumes and everybody's dancing and carrying on and everybody's having a great time actually until the women's Christian temperance. People show up and get the police chief who's also at the bar, who's also at the speakeasy, They get him fired and they bring in a character from the US Treasury Office named Rex Banner who's meant to represent Elliot Ness from the show The Untouchables, the person who wouldn't accept bribes, who would always go after the bad guy and would never be deterred by bribes.

8:54And actually, Fat Tony, who's the mafia guy in town, goes up to bribe Rex Banner in the of the Show, and you know, just puts the money right in his face, and Rex Banner just won't take it. And Fat Tony says, well, if you won't take my money, I'm going to go back to selling heroin. And Rex Banner replies, see that you do. So it's, so when they put the right guys is in charge who, you know, aren't going to take the bribes. In fact, Tony's no longer running in the beer from the next town. The city starts running dry. Then Homer laments, quote, at first I thought, I should have worked on my Homer Simpson imitation, at first I thought prohibition was a good thing. People were drinking more and having a lot more fun.

9:53Without beer, prohibition just doesn't work. And then to underscore his status as a role model for the drinking class, Homer chastises Police Chief Wiggum for giving into the good guys, quote, don't say that chief, alcohol is a way of life. Alcohol is my way of life and I aim to keep it. So Homer becomes, steps into the role as the hero at this point. He's going to do something about this lack of beer. He comes up with the idea of going to the dump where all the duff beer had been dumped and digging it up. And so he gets on that. Rex Banner finds out about this and chases him through a cemetery and he's careening off and running into things in this car. He shows up at home, marches out front waiting for him, and he comes in with this battered up old car and a wagon load full of beer kegs. So Homer develops an ingenious idea of hollowing out bowling balls, filling them with beer, and putting them in this contraption which

11:16somehow ends up back at Moe's bar. And Moe's serving beer for only $45 a mug. So you get the idea of higher prices, criminal activity, violence, and so forth. And Homer turns to Bart and says, the real money is in bootlegging, not your childish vandalism. Bart then concedes Oh, so many wasted nights. And even Marge says that once she finds out that Homer is really this elusive underground character known as the beer baron, when Lisa finds out she's outraged that her father is a bootlegger. But Marge even says that Homer, this is the cleverest So it's a great story. Once they run out of beer from the dump, Homer gets into doing bathtub whiskey. He actually goes to the hardware store and orders 39 bathtubs. And so things You guys are getting, you know, showing that, you know, the higher potency product comes onto the market.

12:37If you have to make it and bring it to market, as I've shown in my book on The Economics of Prohibition, the producers turn towards more potent, easier to conceal, and more dangerous products. And Homer actually gives up his status as the beer baron when all of the stills in his basement start exploding. He's in bed with Marge, they're just about to go to sleep and all these stills start exploding in the basement and Homer tries to cover it up by coughing or apologizing for farting, things like that. Marge isn't having any of it and Homer catches himself on fire trying to put out the explosions and he decides to give in with that. He comes He comes up with a plan to get rid of Rex Barron and get the police chief reinstated, which he does by giving himself into Police Chief Wiggum, and at the end, he, let's see here, yeah, they're going to catapult Homer for being the beer baron, they're going to catapult Homer out of town using a 200-year-old catapult

13:56and then Marge stands up for Homer and then the clerk finds out that no, that law, that 200-year-old law had actually been repealed and so the story ends rather quickly obviously the mayor asked Homer to get the beer coming back into town and he says no I refuse but Fat Tony is willing to flood the town with booze again in four minutes Homer's triumph in the conclusion to the episode is to make a toast to alcohol and freedom. It's very explicitly making the case that freedom is also an issue as well as all these unintended consequences.

14:45From atop a pile of beer kegs, he announces to alcohol the cause of and solution to all and all of life's problems.