Prohibition Through the Eyes of Homer Simpson

0:00Good evening, everybody. I'm Eric Phillips, President of Young Americans for Liberty here at Auburn University. I'm very happy to say our chapter's been getting a lot of attention these past couple weeks. In the past two weeks, four articles have been published about this very chapter, one more impressively being on national headlines of the college section for USA Today. This is actually our first year being an official organization under the bylaws of Auburn University. So if you haven't done so, you can sign up for our email list on that blue clipboard over there. I'm happy to see such a great turnout for our first big event, Prohibition Through the Eyes of Homer Simpson.

0:47This will be led by Austrian economist Dr. Mark Thornton. He teaches economics at Auburn University and is a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute. He also wrote the book, The Economics of Prohibition, which has caught a lot of mainstream media attention and was said by Murray Rothbard to be an excellent work making an important contribution to scholarship as well as to the public policy debate. So without any further ado, please give a warm welcome to Dr. Mark Thornton. Thank you, Eric. I want to welcome all of you to the Mises Institute. I know it's many of you are your first visit here to the Mises Institute. We've been here actually for 27 years now and we have programs for undergraduate students, graduate students, professors and the general public. We We also have a variety of publications in our website, Mises.org, has more content and traffic than just about any economics webpage in the world.

1:58So I encourage you to look into our programs as well as our website, there's a lot of very very interesting stuff on there. Now what I'm going to be talking about tonight is Homer Simpson versus the 18th Amendment. And as a graduate student here at Auburn University, I wrote my dissertation on the topic of the economics of prohibition. And then after that, I spent about 10 or 15 years publishing on that subject, on public policy related to alcohol prohibition of the 1920s, as well as the war on drugs, as well as academic publications concerning prohibition. And then I kind of gave up on the topic of prohibition.

2:43And I felt like I had written everything I needed to write about the subject. And then a couple of years ago, a friend of mine came up with the idea of writing or editing a book called Homer Economicus as a playoff on homo economicus or economic man. He was going to put together a book about Homer Simpson economic man. And he came to Auburn specifically to get me to write one of the chapters and it was about a particular episode of The Simpsons called Homer versus the 18th Amendment. And so that's got me back into writing about the economics of prohibition, both the alcohol prohibition but more so on current events in the war on drugs.

3:35And so that's my background to this topic as well as to the topic of tonight regarding the Simpsons. Now I'm sure everyone has seen the Simpsons and knows a good deal about what Homer Simpson is all about. He's every man in society. He's a prototypical example of the drinking class. And the drinking class is actually a large component of society. Most people, most adults drink, and so the drinking class includes lots of very well-educated people and not so educated people, men and women from all demographic groups and ages.

4:24And so one of the reasons for the success of The Simpsons is because its main character represents your everyday ordinary American with all their faults, drawbacks, imperfections and so forth. And so we tend to pity this class of people that always has problems, everyday ordinary problems that they're trying to fix. They usually make it worse. And so the general, our general response is to pity Homer Simpson and to laugh at him as well, of course. This particular episode, I'm not an expert on The Simpsons. I don't have box sets of all the episodes or anything like that.

5:12I don't even remember a lot of the characters and I haven't even seen all the episodes. So that's not my expertise here. But I know enough about Homer and The Simpsons to tell you that, First of all, this is one of the best episodes in the history of the show. The connections it makes with reality are truly amazing and things are reversed in this particular episode. Homer is not the bumbling, fumbling mechanic at the nuclear power plant. He actually turns into the hero. So this is a very unusual episode as well.

6:01And the reason I think that the writers reversed Homer's role and in a sense turned everything upside down so that Homer was the hero was because Prohibition does pretty much the same thing. sets an entirely new environment and people become something other than themselves. So when we look at Prohibition, in the theory of the Prohibition, where the Prohibitionists look at the situation and say, hey, you know, there's problems with something like drinking. There could be fights, there could be drunkenness, children may be harmed. And so the idea of the Prohibitionists is we're going to make it illegal, we're going going to make it more expensive and it might not work, but at least it's going to impose a higher cost on these drinkers and as a result of the higher cost, people are going to consume less alcohol and therefore if they're consuming less alcohol, there's going to be fewer problems in society.

7:10fewer fights, less violence, less crime, less bad health, drinking, disease, all that kind of stuff. So the prohibitionists say, well, if we make it a prohibition, we impose a higher cost, you're going to get a smaller quantity consumed and therefore it's going to dry up some of the social problems that we associate with drinking. But what my research shows is that, yes, prohibition does raise the price of the product. It can decrease the quantity consumed, that's the basic economics of it. But in reality, when you prohibit something, everything else changes. So it's not just supply and demand, price and quantity changes in prohibition, but it's everything about the marketplace that exists.

8:02So how something is being produced, that's going to change. How it's distributed, that's going to change. The Product itself, that's going to change. How contracts are enforced, that's going to change. And so, as price changes, you're going to get all sorts of other changes in the economy, in the black market or the underground economy. And what we find is that all of these other changes are bad. All of these other changes actually have negative effects. So that instead of solving social problems, prohibition actually makes them worse, okay? So that prohibition is a self-defeating policy, and it's not the people who are enforcing the prohibition.

8:55It's not the penalties that we're meeting out to the people who violate the prohibition. There's nothing, no imperfection in the law or the system of enforcement and punishment that we can adjust to make it work. It's just that all of the prices and all of the incentives are working in the absolute wrong direction. So instead of getting less crime, we get more crime. Instead of less violence, we get more violence. Instead of less criminal activity, we get more criminal activity. Instead of making consumption safer, we actually make it much more dangerous because we end up providing incentives for the people who supply these illegal products to make them as small as possible.

9:48So they want to make it as potent as possible. And as a result, they make it actually more dangerous and more addictive. So on all of these margins, on all of these economic margins, prohibition pushes us in the wrong direction and actually is counterproductive with respect to social problems. This episode is just a tremendous recap of what happened in the United States from 1920 1933, when we prohibited alcohol consumption and production in the United States. Now obviously with 22 minutes, they're going to take some shortcuts, they're going to gloss over things, the action is fast paced, but with respect to all of the phenomenon that resulted from prohibition, they did just a tremendous job of incorporating all the various aspects, all of the impacts that prohibition brings about.

10:59Two of the most important things that I want you to pay attention to as we go through the video, two of the things that I stressed in my own dissertation with respect to alcohol prohibition was that the first thing that it did was it changed the type of product that was being produced and consumed in the United States. So that when alcohol was prohibited, what they first did was they used up what they already had, okay? But as the cupboards ran dry, as the inventories went to zero, they had to come up with a way of producing alcohol in this new environment. What we found looking back in the 1920s is that instead of producing beer and wine, which the vast majority of drinkers back then consumed, that all the new production went into the production of whiskey, hard liquor, and very often they would produce it at potency levels twice that of a normal whiskey or vodka.

12:04so that it would be like Myers 151 rum, twice as potent as a normal rum, or Everclear, products like that. Highly potent and poorly made, okay, so it was poorly made and highly potent. So that the sales of whiskey went from less than 40% prior and after prohibition to upwards Awards of 90%, okay, so the market was completely skewed towards this much more potent, much more dangerous and much more impure in the sense that it had dangerous impurities in it. The second major thing is that during the 1920s, violence, crime and destruction of of Property increased dramatically during the 1920s as a result of prohibition.

13:04So there was a lot more violence in society, there was a lot more crime, and there was a lot more destruction of private property during that time. The murder rate in the United States in 1920 went from 50 murders per million people to 100 murders per million people per year and it stayed that way until Prohibition was repealed in 1933 and then it very quickly by 1935 went back down to the norm of 50 murders per million people per year. So you can see statistically that Prohibition encouraged murders as what we'll come to learn are rumrunners, bootleggers, people who are transporting this illegal liquor had to use guns to enforce their contracts and to protect their sales territory.

14:06So the violence increased. Okay with that, I'm going to start to take a look at the episode itself. Now the big question in a lot of people's minds is how do you get prohibition in the in the first place. It always seems so stupid and so counterproductive to people who actually are aware of the reality of prohibition. Well, it takes a lot of factors to fall into place. There has to be some rationale to establish prohibition. And one of the rationales is to protect children. That's very often a rationale for public policies, to protect children, to keep them safe, to keep them away from dangerous things that society has.

15:00And so the argument that we have to think about the children and curtailing the availability of alcohol is always going to be an important matter with respect to products like alcohol and drugs. Another thing that usually has to come into play is scapegoats in society, demographic groups within society that are labeled as scapegoats or as reasons why we need to create a prohibition. So with alcohol prohibition, people pointed to, in particular, the Irish people who were Always Getting Drunk and Causing Problems and Fighting, the Germans, the Italians, the big drinking groups that had arrived in the United States prior to Prohibition.

15:56With cocaine, the scapegoat was the idea that black men who took cocaine would go violent and be uncontrollable and couldn't be stopped with a pistol bullet. And so because of that, that was a story that was often given that we needed prohibition of cocaine because if we allowed black men to have cocaine, then we would just put these crazy people into society. Of course, that's not true. With marijuana prohibition, no one testified for marijuana prohibition in Congress, but it passed anyways. And one of the arguments with marijuana prohibition is that if we let the Mexican, if we let the domestic Mexicans consume marijuana they would be lazy and they wouldn't work and they wouldn't take care of their families.

16:52And so that was a generally accepted idea that Mexicans like to smoke pot and if they smoke pot they wouldn't work. And even I was like, you know, my whole life I just sort of assumed that, yeah, Mexicans because we're lazy, of course, until we got into the housing bubble and then we realized you can't stop these Mexicans from working. So it's all these scapegoating of minority groups have to come into play in order to pass a prohibition. You have to have muck-raking media, media that just want to stir up a story, get things stirred up so that more people are reading their newspapers and so forth.

17:38You have to have the support of religious groups, and with Prohibition, the Women's Temperance, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was a group of women who were teetotallers, which means they didn't drink. They were middle-class American WASPs, which were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who didn't like the idea of people drinking and having fun, OK? So you need some kind of support for that. And then you also have to have a lack of arguments against prohibition, OK? So if there's good arguments against prohibition, then it's hard to implement it.

18:24So you have to have bad arguments in place in order to get that. So what we see here with this episode, Homer versus the Eighteenth Amendment, it opens on St. Patrick's Day. And so we're going to see what happened on St. Patrick's Day in Springfield. So, it's St. Patrick's Day. You sure look stupid in that green dress, Lise. That's funny. I don't feel stupid.

19:01Hey, everybody's wearing green. Oh, no. Happy St. Patrick's Day, loser! Ow! Quit it! It's the wearing of the green, Bart! Pinch, pinch, pinch! No one's pinching his legs! Now, this is a really funny scene right here. Moe at his best. Moe, it's been St. Patrick's Day for hours and I'm still not drunk yet. Oh, it's never going to be nine o'clock. Oh, Moe, thank God you're here. We'd like to come in and drink please. We kicked down the back door but then it was a metal door. Yeah. See, this is Homer at the way he typically is. He changes during the episode.

19:50All right, listen up. This is the busiest drinking day of the year. Where are the designated drivers? Beat it! I got no room for cheapskates. Top of the morning to ye on this great, drizzly afternoon. Kent O. Brockman, live on Main Street, where today everyone is a little bit Irish. Except, of course, for the gays and the Italians. Parades just bring out so many emotions in me. Joy, excitement, looking. Mom, can I go buy one of those long plastic horns? Oh, Bart, we've bought those before and you always just throw them out the car window on the ride home. I get bored with them, but that won't happen this time.

20:36Beep, beep, coming through. Hey, Notre Dame, move it or lose it. The destruction of the property is a British fish-and-chip restaurant, which, of course, the Irish were always blowing up in Northern Ireland. Are these the things we think of when we think of the Irish?

21:22Hey, give me some room! Watch it, Gumbel-Shamers! Hey, look, everybody, free beer! Open your yaps, boyos! Everybody! Everybody get naked! Come on, don't be stuck up, it's going to be great! Well, why not? This party's just getting started!

22:07Stop the celebration! That small boy is drunk!

22:17Look at me! I'm the Prime Minister of Ireland! Hey, home, ain't that your kid on TV?

22:39What are you looking at? What are you looking at? The innocent words of a drunken child. Well, I'll tell you what we're looking at, young man. A town gone mad. A town whose very conscience was washed away in a tide of beer and green vomit. I'm going down to Moe's for a couple beers. I'll come with you. No! No more drinking. I'm tired of looking like the world's worst mother. Oh, honey, you're not the world's worst mother. What about that freezer lady in Georgia? But what's the solution? Are we so bereft of ideas that we must revive the antiquated notion of prohibition? Channel 6 says yes. Prohibition. They tried that in the movies and it didn't work. I predict this is the last we'll be hearing about prohibition.

23:29We want prohibition! We want prohibition! You can't seriously want to ban alcohol? Some good lines here from the mayor and the police chief. It tastes great, makes women appear more attractive, and makes a person virtually invulnerable to criticism. Won't somebody please think of the children? What kind of an example are we setting? Ladies, please, all our founding fathers, astronauts and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine. Wait, looky here. Seems there's been a prohibition law on the books in Springfield for 200 years. Well, it's just never all been enforced. Get out of here, old clerk guy.

24:14There's also an law requiring ducks to wear long pants. Wait a minute, let me see that. Well, I'll be darned long pants. Read the other one, the non-duck one. And spiritual beverages are hereby prohibited under penalty of catapult.

24:39Did you see this, Bernice? Oh, my. So that's how Prohibition comes to Springfield. Of course, in the United States, it took a hundred years. The writers of The Simpsons decided to speed that up with a clerical error finding the Prohibition had been on the book for 200 years, so they just sort of jumped to Head. But they did put in all of the elements there. You see the think of the child argument. You see the middle-class women's arguing in front of City Hall to get this prohibition and to get things cleaned up. And of course, the punishment for violating the prohibition is to be catapulted out of town which is sort of showing that the punishment for violating prohibition is unreasonable and of course also the fact that the people can't believe that a prohibition was enacted.

25:47That was true in the United States in 1920. People couldn't believe that it would finally come through because prohibitionists had been and working for 100 years to try to get prohibition nationwide and they could never do it. So prohibition has been enacted, and now we're going to take a look at, yes? One of the reasons too that it was lawyered for was that women in the temperance movement were victims of a lot of abuse, and they correlated it with alcohol, and you just said that was all of the reasons. That was one of the major ones I know I spent it out. Well, I think it was a reason, particularly husbands who would drink up their pay before they actually got home and be abusive to the wife and the children, but for the leaders of the organization, it had a lot to do with just general social problems that they saw around them and that made their lives more difficult.

26:51So in any case, we get the prohibition. You can't produce alcohol anymore and so there's a quick end to drinking in Springfield, legally. But then of course, the illegal marketplace comes into play and we get speakeasies which are illegal bars or saloons. We get bootleggers and rumrunners who are people who transport alcohol illegally, rumrunning occurs at sea, bootlegging occurs on land. We get bribery of public officials. We get organized crime, okay, organized crime bribes public officials in order to establish and Social Monopoly and without being penalized by the law.

27:49This leads to calls for more enforcement, political pressure for more enforcement and so eventually a character from the US Treasury Department, Rex Banner, is brought in to stamp out the illegal marketplace and Rex Banner, his look and his voice are modeled after those shows of Elliot Ness, on the TV show The Untouchables and as a matter of fact the narrator's voice on this episode is a mimic of Walter Winchell who was the narrator on The Untouchables. Now that show hasn't been on the air for many, many decades so you'd have to actually go and find, look it up but you'll see that basically that Rex Banner and The Untouchables were were untouchable because they would not accept bribes.

28:40Most law enforcement officials in the United States during the 1920s accepted bribes. Eliot Ness would not. And so that's going to play a major role because if law enforcement aren't willing to take bribes, then organized crime cannot be organized. and so it has to be thrown onto the disorganized crime marketplace basically. And with Banner, you get all sorts of violent and destructive tactics. He won't take a bribe and he's basically very ineffective at enforcing prohibition. So he won't take a bribe but he doesn't really get the job done anyways. So that's to point out the fact that it doesn't matter who's enforcing the prohibition, it still doesn't work.

29:34Eliot Ness, for all his honesty and for all of his efforts and for all of his special units never actually captured what he was hired to do which was get Al Capone, the famous gangster of the 1920s. Capone was actually arrested, tried, and convicted for tax evasion, not for evading prohibition. No, we're not worried. Our customers buy Duff for its robust taste, and on its alcoholic content, I predict our new alcohol-free Duff Zero will sell even better than our previous brand.

30:3030 minutes later. Well, that's the end of me. Deadline! Springfield! With Prohibition back in force, sobriety's peaceful slumber was shattered by its noisy neighbor, the Speakeasy. Glad you're fine. The sobriety's peaceful slumber was shattered by its noisy neighbor, the speakeasy. Glad you're finally back in business, no? Yeah, that was a scary couple of hours. The suppliers of the illegal booze? Gangsters. Running from Lowe to Smuggy Hooch on the way from Shelbyville. And John Lowe was helpless. You didn't say nothing. I don't know why people are always bad-mouthing the mafia.

31:25Oh, jeez, this looks bad. Better turn on the all-Wiggum charm. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Pervert! Oh boy, that sounded bad. We demand you bring in a police chief who will enforce the prohibition law. Demand? Who are you to demand anything? I run this town. Down, you're just a bunch of low-income nobodies. Uh, election in November, election in November. What? Again? This stupid country. With rum-winning hoodlums in the catbird seat, Springfield sent for the one man who could clean up the town and shoot the gangsters, Rex Benner.

32:23Hey, I was watching that. And I was sitting there. Rex Banner, I'm running this department now. Wiggum, you're out. Suspended, indefinitely. Huh? Tuck in that shirt. Get those shoes shined. Take that badge out of your mouth. You're police officers. Well, what are you waiting for? Somebody to kiss you goodbye? Well, no, no, no, I guess not. Wasting no time, Rex Banner tore into the bootleggers like a chippy tearing into a lobster.

33:09How do you know you don't like bribes if you've never taken one? Here. Say, this is nice. No, no bribes! Okay, you win. From now on, we'll stick to smuggling heroin. See that you do! At first I thought prohibition was a good thing. People were drinking more and having a lot more fun. But without beer, prohibition doesn't work. Hey, hi, can I arrest any of you people for anything? No. This is the transformation here. Geez, I don't have anything to do anymore with banter around alcohol and crime or history in this town. And so am I. Now don't say that. Alcohol is a way of life. All is my way of life, and I aim to keep it. Sounds like you have a plan.

33:55Maybe I do, Chief. Maybe I do. Come on, boys, think of a plan. I'm trying, Dad. Kent Frackman at the now-closed Duff Bottling Plant, where a mysterious person in black keeps a solitary vigil. Err. I've got it. We're going out, Marge. If we don't come back, avenge our deaths. All right. Whoa, bonanza! Let's load it up before the rats regroup. Right, now remember, don't mention this to anyone. Not your mother, not Rex Banner, not anyone.

34:39Heh, Rex Banner, what a dope. Yeah, look at him try to aim that stupid gun.

34:49Hang on, son!

34:54Dad, knocking over gravestone is bad luck. Really? I heard good. You'll see how this experience changes Homer and Marge. What happened to you, Homer? And what have you done to the car? Nothing. I don't think it had broken axles before. Before, before. You're living in the past, Marge. Quit living in the past. That's funny. I used to be able to go down there. There's going to be a couple of steps here, but basically they're showing how Homer uses clever, sophisticated techniques to try to cover up his new business. Going bowling, not back events stats.

35:43Why do you have so many bowling balls? Oh, I'm not going to lie to you, Marge. So long.

36:01Oh, rats, another gutter ball. Gee, Homer, you sure do suck tonight. Yeah, suck like a fox.

36:15Here you go, Bond. That'll be 45 bucks. 45 bucks? Well, this better be the best tasting beer in the world. You got lucky. You see, boy, the real money's in bootlegging, not in your childish vandalism. Oh, so many wasted nights. What's the matter, Chief? Yeah, you barely touched your banana kaboom.

37:00This isn't a very happy birthday for Rex Banner. And that's the way they play it. Hello, fishies. Listen, Rummy, I'm going to say it plain and simple. Where'd you pinch the hooch? Is some blind tiger jerking suds on the side? Yes. Wait a minute. I forgot to make sure the coast was clear. That's probably clear. Let's go. Beer! I can explain, Marge. Please let me explain. Oh, why won't you let me explain? You're the one the papers have been talking about. That mysterious beer baron who's been supplying Springfield with alcohol.

37:48How have you been getting away with this? Well, and I can explain, remember. I fill the balls with beer that I found at the dump and then I bowl them and some underground pipes take them into mows. Homer, that's very clever. Huh? Mom? Yes, I've known your father since high school, and this is the cleverest thing he's ever done. Besides, he's only breaking the silly 200-year-old law. It is silly, Marge. And look at all the money I'm making. Ooh. Mom, prohibition may be unpopular, but it's the law, and we still have... Go to your room, Lisa. See how it's changed Marge, too. This is the most clever thing that Homer's ever done, This is another example of Rex Banner not being very effective.

38:34They're going to show how the speak-easy works if cops come. Some of the features, like a locked door where you have to slip in and out of the door. They're going to show how the speak-easy works if cops come.

38:54Some of the features like a locked door where you have to slide it open and see the person and use special passwords to get in. There was actually a place like this in my hometown where they sold illegal alcohol and had an illegal casino. And when the cops came, there was a long road before you got to this restaurant. And so they could see the cops coming and they had all these devices so that it might look like you're playing a slot machine, that they could actually turn the whole thing around and the slot machine would go behind a hidden wall and they had all sorts of things like that in there. Open up, Curly. This is a raid. A raid? Curly? Um, all right, but I don't know what you expect to find in a simple neighborhood pet shop.

39:53Pet Shop, eh? Well, I just have one question. What kind of pet shop is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 a.m.? Um, uh, the best damn pet shop in town! Yeah! All right, you people remember. Baby turtles and alligators may seem like a cute idea for They're a pet, but they grow up. Let's go, boys.

40:30Wow! Those gears down there really hurt.

40:38You're out there somewhere, beer baron, and I'll find you. No, you won't. Yes, I will. Won't. Dinkline, Springfield, the elusive beer baron continued to thumb his nose at authorities. Swaggering about in a garish new hat, he seemed to say, Look at me, Rex Benner, I have a new hat. Hey, boy, get cracking. Mow up disorder to 20 balls a night. Uh, Dad. Call me Beer Baron. All the beer from the landfill is gone, Beer Baron. We're out of business. But I can't be out of beer. I'm the Beer Baron. So this is his second idea.

41:39The first one was to use the existing beer that was in the dump, and now he's got the My second idea implanted in his head is that he's going to make stuff and we'll see exactly what he's going to make. Forty-two bathtubs, please. You know, they're fifty for three thousand dollars today. I said forty-two.

42:04Now you're making your own alcohol? That's even more illegal than what you were doing before. Remember, honey, we're disobeying an unjust law here. We're patriots, like all those people in jail.

42:27Who wants a bathtub mint julep?

42:36Are you the beer baron? Well, if you're talking about root beer, I plead guilt-diddly-ilty as char-diddly-arged. He's not the Baron, but he sounds drunk. Take him in. Are you the beer baron? Yes, but only by night. By day, I'm a mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. Don't crack wise with me, tubby. Tubby? Oh, yes, tubby. Hey, Fander, how's it hanging? None of your business.

43:07What on earth happened down there? One of the stills- Nothing, March. I think it must have been that bean I had for dinner. So all this stuff is representative of bathtub gin. Notice that almost all of it is whiskey of one sort or another. It's being made, obviously, very crudely, and stills blowing up was a big problem if If you're making amateur stills to condense the alcohol, you've got a heat source, basically cooking a very flammable substance, and if the still itself is not made professionally with high gauge copper and welding and so forth, they're very likely to blow up.

43:57So a very dangerous thing. Kaboom! Blammo! Excuse me again, dear. Homer, there's no point in pretending you're making those noises. Your homemade liquor is exploding again. What, dear? Kablammo! You made some money and had the fun of being a wanted criminal. Why not quit now, while you're ahead? Boom. I'll be right back. I thought about what you said, honey. And I've decided to quit. Oh well, fun's over, but I still have my wonderful money.

44:51Here comes his third idea. Geez, what happened to you, Wiggum? You look terrible. Yeah, never mind how I look. You gonna give me the money or not? Well, I don't think so. You don't even have a trigger on that thing. Yeah, to sell the trigger. Most of the handle to feed my family. Come on, give me the dough. I can throw this pretty hard. Poor Wigam. Poor Wigam. I'll bet you really hate Rex Banner, huh? Um, who? The guy who took your job. Oh, yeah. More than anything in the world. Hey, how would you like to show him up by beating him at his own game? I'm happy to report that the flow of illegal liquor seems to have dried up. Public drunkenness has ceased and those mysterious liquor clouds over Evergreen Terrace are gone. People, Rex Banner has won your war against alcohol. What about the beer barrel? I suspect he was just an invention of the media. The idea that someone like that could operate under my varying nose

45:50We now go live to Evergreen Terrace, where I'm informed that former police chief Wiggum has captured the beer baron. The captured Homer? Then the liquor-filled bowling balls traveled through a network of underground pipes, finally emerging at a nearby speakeasy. You forgot one thing, Wiggum. Yeah, what's that? I filled the balls with a funnel. That was a very sweet thing you did for poor Wiggum. But what's going to happen to you? Oh, probably just a slap on the wrist. Okay, so now Homer's in for his punishment. And there's two important speeches here. Marge has a speech where she makes the plea against prohibition and punishing Homer based on a and the loss that prohibition causes a loss of liberty and freedom.

46:52And then at the very end of the episode, Homer makes a short speech where he puts the whole thing in perspective, alcohol use and abuse and some of the social problems that are associated with that and comparing those to the experience that they've had with prohibition. I think what he says puts that whole, those issues into context, into the proper context, actually. And he who shall violate this law shall be punished by catapult. Last time I helped you. Sorry, I thought you'd get a fine, or at most three, four years in jail. Hold it! This machine is two centuries old. Better test it first.

47:41Hello.

47:46Okay, go ahead. Wait, wait, you can't do this. All my husband did was violate a law that doesn't make sense. Now, I'll admit, car crashes and fist fights have been down recently, but prohibition has cost us our freedom. Our freedom to drink. No! Now, hold on a minute, Missy. It's not up to us to choose which laws we want to obey. If it were, I'd kill everyone who looked at me cock-eyed. Our laws are in place for a reason. Send him back to mama, boys.

48:20That was unexpected. Well, reset the catapult and let's get this over with. Wait! I've discovered more lines on the parchment. It says that the prohibition law, which was passed here 200 years ago, was repealed 199 years ago. Release the prisoner. On behalf of the city, I'd like to apologize and ask how long it will take for you to flood this town with booze again. Well, sorry. I'm not in that business anymore. Four minutes. And so, one town's brief flirtation with Prohibition ended in a joyous remarriage to Lady Liquor. Congratulations, Springfield. We wish you the very best to alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

49:13That's it. So they had to take a few shortcuts with the... You know, with the establishment of prohibition and the ending of it, things of that nature, but I think they really covered the reality for us, the prohibition that we can't see. You know, we know there's a war on drugs out there. We see somebody getting arrested in Lee County every month or so, or whatever it happens to be, but because it's secretive, very little of it actually leaks out into our lives.

50:00You know, there probably are a hundred or so people selling illegal drugs in Lee County. There are probably people in Lee County who are making methamphetamines and growing pot. There are thousands of people who are consuming illegal drugs, given that Auburn University is here. But it's all underground. And so we don't see it. We don't get a catalog listing of all of the negative effects of families being broken up and breadwinners being thrown in jail, medical patients going without something that might be able to help them through their illnesses and conditions. All of that is not highly visualized in our world here in rural Alabama.

50:52But I think that this episode and my analysis of it is that it's a very accurate description of what's actually going on behind these closed areas that we don't see on a regular basis. And it's certainly an accurate description, however short it happens to be, of what happened during Alcohol Prohibition in this country during the 1920s. So if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them, but that's the basic end of the show. Okay? Thank you very much. Sure. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the difference between outside of the football stadium and inside the football stadium and how the types of prohibited substances are played.

51:47Yeah, well that's actually an example where you can actually see it on a regular basis, the impact of prohibition, the fact that the football stadium, alcohol is prohibited. And so if you were at the game and did tailgating last Saturday for the football game, what you'll see is tens of thousands of people around the stadium and a good percentage of

52:44Inside the stadium where it's illegal, what you're going to find is they're typically drinking double-proof rum, Everclear, which is 160-proof, I guess it is, and all sorts of regular whiskeys as well, brandy, whiskey, but in particular the double-proof versions of all of them. The reason is because that prohibition encourages people to consume the most concentrated and potent forms of alcohol that they can get their hands on because that limits the authority's ability to capture you and to prevent you from bringing alcohol into the stadium.

53:30So you see very few people attempting to bring cans or bottles of beer into the stadium. There is a story that dates back into like the 1980s, I think, that a fraternity actually successfully got a keg into the game but no one has been able to verify that story. And I haven't seen beer inside the stadium, outside of the boxes, there's plenty of booze is up there. So that does give you a visual example of one aspect of what happens during prohibition.

54:16But the type of alcohol that they bring in, at least it doesn't have any poisons and adulterants in it, it's standard liquor. But as a consequence, you've got basically people who aren't used to drinking liquor, who are used to drinking beer, they're drinking liquor, and there is a tendency for a few people to get drunk at the game, I mean more so than they otherwise would be, accidentally drunk. Okay, thank you very much.

55:03Thank you for watching.