Our New Prohibition

This past December marked the 75th anniversary of a lesson the United States learned and then quickly forgot: the uselessness and harmfulness of wars of prohibition. Fourteen years after launching an extraordinary social experiment inspired by the feminist-founded temperance movement and encouraged by progressives of every sort, America gave up on the legal prohibition of “intoxicating liquors.” After the country suffered an enormous rise in public corruption and organized crime, as well as a striking decline in the protection of civil rights, right-thinking sorts recognized that the costs of that war were wildly greater than any of its benefits.

Not that addiction to alcohol wasn’t a harm. And not that it wasn’t a harm worth fighting. But after enormous social loss with little public return, America recognized it would have to be through means other than government regulation that we would save the souls of the wets of America. Reformers can dream, but the law lives in the real world.

In the 75 years since this lesson was first learned, we’ve waged at least two other hopeless wars of prohibition. The bloodiest of these has been the war on drugs. The most recent has been the war against “p2p,” or peer-to-peer, piracy—what some in the industry call the copyright wars or what the late Jack Valenti, former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, called his own “terrorist war,” in which apparently the terrorists are our children.

Over the past decade, copyright extremists have been waging an ever more vicious war against our kids in the name of preserving the sanctity of copyrights. They have succeeded in getting the law strengthened at least a dozen times. The Recording Industry Association of America has filed lawsuits against more than 35,000 people since 2003.

Universities have begun policing their networks and expelling kids who violate antipiracy policies as a way of avoiding even greater pressure from the industry. And countries around the world are now experimenting with a three-strikes policy for Internet access—violate copyright rules three times and your Internet connection will be shut off, permanently.

Though I oppose both the war on drugs and the war against p2p piracy, my opposition has nothing to do with a love of drugs or support for the violation of copyright laws. In this respect, I’m a two-time teetotaler. I am against the abuse of any addictive drug (especially added sugar), and I don’t support the use of peer-to-peer file sharing to violate the rights of artists. Instead, my opposition to both wars comes from a basic commitment to regulatory pragmatism. And in my view, regulators would be wise to learn to be a bit more humble about the effectiveness of their trade.