• Debt. The government seriously screwed up here. Obama is refusing to accept any kind of balanced budget deal and wants cuts in defense spending. And then there are people who support raising the debt limit... If you are stuck in a deep hole digging five feet deeper doesn't get you closer to getting out. No idea who taught our congressmen economics (or logic for that matter). The best solution would be to cut spending, create a balanced budget and try not to raise taxes.
• California requires gay history in its schools now [1]
• Obama spent 3 trillion on a bailout... which hasn't done anything. 
• Americans are forced to get health insurance

Hazlitt tells us the lesson in the first chapter. This lesson, that of looking at short-term as well as long-term effects of economic policy on everyone, makes sense. He points out that whatever economic policy we adopt, we should consider how it effects everyone and not just a specific group.

In the following chapters, Hazlitt provides examples that are connected to that message. These include: tariffs, minimum wage laws, and rent controls. These illustrations are usually implemented by the government and supported by the groups that the policies are supposed to benefit. He gives whole chapters on these cases and goes into some depth of what each of the topics are and who it hurts and benefits. He also states how each example applies to the lesson and how they are normally used. The chapters and cases have proven the message of the book, but people have often ignored it.

Why has the lesson of this book been so often neglected? Because most people only see the immediate benefit for a specific group of people. They often don’t see the long-term effects on that particular group, or even the short-term or long-term effect on everyone else. In order to get the full effect of what could happen to everyone, as Hazlitt points out frequently in the book, we would need to look at how policies and decisions effect not only on a short-term basis, but also on a long-term basis.

This book presents what shouldn’t be oversight or knee-jerk economics , but what will happen to the entire economy after a policy has taken effect.

To God be the glory,
~R.E.

By the time the 18^th Amendment (or the Prohibition Amendment) passed Congress, many states, such as Michigan and Washington, had passed their own prohibition laws and were all to willing to ratify the amendment. How did the states get the prohibition laws passed when the majority of the people, especially in the cities, were still drinking so much? The “malapportionment of state legislatures,”[2] was the one significant cause because they hadn’t followed the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of the number of people represented by a Congressman. Each Congressman was required, by the U.S. to represent 30,000 people.[3] While in the country a Congressman might represent 15,000 people, in the city a different Congressman might represent seven times that. (Okrent, Last Call, p. 105) But, why did the states think state prohibition would work?

The state legislatures and people, like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WTCU) and the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) assumed that prohibition had benefits, including lower crime rates, increased productivity, less political corruption (Okrent, Last Call, p. 75) and improved health. (Behr, Prohibition, p. 22) They assumed prohibition would work, bring benefits, and be amply enforced. But did it work in the states before the national prohibition? Could it be, and was it amply, enforced? Did it really bring the proclaimed benefits?

Prohibition on the state levels didn’t work, for it had the problems that the Georgian Prohibition had in its eight years, and even more when national prohibition came along. The states were definitely getting what they paid for in state, and later national, enforcement. They provided some, if any, funds and jobs to enforce laws, but it wasn’t enough to keep enforcement for what was meant to be done.

The states didn’t look to see if there was any precedent that proved prohibition would work. They thought most Americans would obey the laws, and some did. But not all Americans did obey because they wanted to drink and thought it was their choice to drink. Alexander Hamilton agreed with these Americans who thought that it was okay to drink because it was their “personal choice and had nothing to do with what part of the country they lived in,” (Okrent, Last Call, p. 53) or even which country they lived in. Alcohol became more popular in the prohibition era because many Americans were denying the 18^th Amendment by drinking to drown the sorrows of the Great Depression which hit in October 1929. More than ever, state level prohibition set a more recent and larger precedent, due to the multiple states having prohibition, than the Georgian Prohibition for what would happen on the national level.

“The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”[4] But, the federal government, like the states, was getting as much enforcement as they were willing to pay. Enforcement’s appropriated sum, even at its largest amount, was small and made it easy for gangsters to bribe the majority of authorities to look the other way. At maximum an enforcement agent could get was $2,800 a year,[5] and never did the funding of enforcement pass, or even become equal to, the cost of enforcement.[6] The federal government also thought that the proposed benefits from the 18^th Amendment would become reality when it came into effect on January 16, 1920 because they thought people would obey the law.

During national prohibition, as Mark Thorton stated in a policy analysis of prohibition, “crime increased and became ‘organized’; the court and prison systems were stretched to the breaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant.” [7] Crime increased because there was a market, which wasn’t taxed by government, that produced something the people wanted. Also, alcohol for medical purposes was exempt from prohibition laws, which then helped create the biggest income for pharmacies because doctors prescribed to anybody a pint of alcohol. Although drinking did reduce during the beginning of prohibition, it had been declining for the last few decades and a further decrease in drinking might have been “due to the high cost of bootlegged liquor, rather than the law itself,”[8] or by the fact that it had been gradually going down since 1910, when the per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages was 1.6 gallons per person. (Thorton, Alcohol Prohibition) Whether it was due to the amount of liquor available or the law, drinking and crime rates increased after prohibition was enacted.