Eight Million Sots in the Naked City

I enjoyed Jackson Kuhl's review of books on alcohol prohibition ("Eight Million Sots in the Naked City," November). Greater wartime centralization of power in Washington, along with hostility to the Irish and Italians, surely helped fuel Uncle Sam's willingness to declare alcohol verboten. But the spark that ignited Prohibition goes unmentioned by Kuhl and, apparently, by the authors whose books he reviews. That spark was the national income tax.

Prior to the 1914 creation of the income tax, taxing alcohol was second only to taxing imports as a source of federal revenue. So when, during World War I, the income tax proved to be a revenue-gathering megastar, Congress finally could afford to cave in to the dry lobby. By 1919 the sacrificed liquor tax revenues were only a tiny portion of the budget.

By 1933--the year Congress successfully proposed repeal of the Prohibition amendment--the revenue situation was reversed. In that Depression year, income tax revenues had toppled by more than 60 percent from their 1930 level. Addicted to revenue, Uncle Sam ended Prohibition so that he could again tax alcohol.

Donald J. Boudreaux

Chairman, Department of Economics

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA

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