The Week

Last week marked an important anniversary—forty years ago, at 1:32 p.m., EST, December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended. In this 13-year “noble experiment,” we all learned, ineradicably and forever, that in free societies the government is literally incapable of suppressing a good for which a substantial market exists, and that by its efforts to suppress such markets, the government actually increased the production and consumption of the proscribed good, made it more profitable, and turned the whole business over to crooks, creating far more problems than there were in the first place. As H. L. Mencken noted at the time, “All the great villainies of history have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers.” By the way, next week we mark the fortieth anniversary of forgetting all the lessons of Prohibition.

Senator George Aiken (R., Vt.) recently remarked that Congress ought to impeach the President or “get off his back.” The House Judiciary Committee is replying, like the woman in Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Under a weak chairman, Representative Peter Rodino of New Jersey, and with 16 of its twenty Democratic members identified with the left wing of that Party, the Committee plans to spin out its hearings for almost a year, until next October. Not surprisingly, the October concluding date carries the hearings to the threshold of the 1974 elections. Not surprisingly, either, a majority of the Committee has indicated that it would be prepared to recommend impeachment for noncriminal as well as criminal offenses.

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Last week marked an important anniversary—forty years ago, at 1:32 p.m., EST, December 5, 1933, Prohibition ended. In this 13-year “noble experiment,” we all learned, ineradicably and forever, that in free societies the government is literally incapable of suppressing a good for which a substantial market exists, and that by its efforts to suppress such markets, the government actually increased the production and consumption of the proscribed good, made it more profitable, and turned the whole business over to crooks, creating far more problems than there were in the first place. As H. L. Mencken noted at the time, “All the great villainies of history have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers.” By the way, next week we mark the fortieth anniversary of forgetting all the lessons of Prohibition.

Senator George Aiken (R., Vt.) recently remarked that Congress ought to impeach the President or “get off his back.” The House Judiciary Committee is replying, like the woman in Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Under a weak chairman, Representative Peter Rodino of New Jersey, and with 16 of its twenty Democratic members identified with the left wing of that Party, the Committee plans to spin out its hearings for almost a year, until next October. Not surprisingly, the October concluding date carries the hearings to the threshold of the 1974 elections. Not surprisingly, either, a majority of the Committee has indicated that it would be prepared to recommend impeachment for noncriminal as well as criminal offenses.