WEBVTT NOTE 14. Repeal the Drinking Age 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000 REPEAL THE DRINKING AGE 2 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Somehow, and no one seems to even imagine how, this country managed to survive and thrive before 1984 without a national minimum drinking age. 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:20.000 Before that, the drinking question was left to the states. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:28.000 In the 19th century, and looking back even before, prepare yourself to imagine horrific, anarchistic nightmares. 5 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.440 There were no drinking laws anywhere, so far as anyone can tell. 6 00:00:33.440 --> 00:00:38.520 The regulation of drinking and age was left to society, which is to say, families, churches 7 00:00:38.520 --> 00:00:43.660 and communities, with varying sensibilities, who regulated such things with varying degrees 8 00:00:43.660 --> 00:00:46.160 of intensity. 9 00:00:46.160 --> 00:00:50.560 Probably some kids drank themselves silly, and we all know that this doesn't happen 10 00:00:50.560 --> 00:00:56.080 now, wink-wink, but many others learned to drink responsibly from an early age, even 11 00:00:56.080 --> 00:01:01.720 and Drinking Bourbon for Breakfast Really, it is only because we are somehow 12 00:01:01.720 --> 00:01:07.840 used to it that we accept the complete absurdity of a national law that prohibits the sale 13 00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:13.920 of beer, wine and liquor to anyone under the age of 21. 14 00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:18.080 This is a restriction unknown in the developed world. 15 00:01:18.080 --> 00:01:23.120 Most countries set 18 as the limit and countries like Germany and Austria allow 16-year-olds 16 00:01:23.120 --> 00:01:26.080 to Buy Wine and Beer. 17 00:01:26.080 --> 00:01:31.280 In the home of the brave, the police are busting up teen parties, shutting down bars, hectoring 18 00:01:31.280 --> 00:01:37.700 restaurants, finding convenience stores, and otherwise bullying people into clean living. 19 00:01:37.700 --> 00:01:43.040 We read the news and think, crazy kids, they shouldn't be doing this. 20 00:01:43.040 --> 00:01:48.440 And yet, every day, young people are finding ways around these preposterous restrictions 21 00:01:48.440 --> 00:02:07.520 On college campuses, the industry of the fake ID thrives as never before. 22 00:02:07.520 --> 00:02:12.440 It seems nearly true that almost every student believes himself or herself in need of getting 23 00:02:12.440 --> 00:02:13.920 one. 24 00:02:13.920 --> 00:02:15.640 Do the restaurants and bars know this? 25 00:02:15.640 --> 00:02:17.840 Of course they do. 26 00:02:17.840 --> 00:02:21.900 They have every interest in having these fake IDs look as real as possible to give themselves 27 00:02:21.900 --> 00:02:25.360 some degree of legal immunity if someone gets caught. 28 00:02:25.360 --> 00:02:30.600 The whole thing is a gigantic fake-a-roo, a mass exercise in open but unspoken hypocrisy, 29 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:33.780 and everyone knows it. 30 00:02:33.780 --> 00:02:39.720 If you think about it, it is the very definition of a state gone mad that a society would have 31 00:02:39.720 --> 00:02:45.140 a law of this sort spread out over an entire nation that tells people that they cannot 32 00:02:45.140 --> 00:02:58.020 In Virginia, in the colonial period where the average lifespan was 25, this law would 33 00:02:58.020 --> 00:03:03.260 have provided only four years of drinking in the last fifth of one's life. 34 00:03:03.260 --> 00:03:05.260 But what a way to go. 35 00:03:05.260 --> 00:03:10.100 However, if you think about the history of this country in the 20th century, one might 36 00:03:10.100 --> 00:03:16.040 might say that the age of 21 is actually rather liberal, as strange as that may sound. 37 00:03:16.040 --> 00:03:21.260 After all, it was in this country, the land of the free, that the federal government actually 38 00:03:21.260 --> 00:03:26.940 added as part of its constitution a total banning of liquor, wine and beer, from sea 39 00:03:26.940 --> 00:03:32.700 to shining sea, 1920 to 1933. 40 00:03:32.700 --> 00:03:38.740 The 1920s roared, in any case, with organized crime, speakeasies, police corruption, rampant 41 00:03:38.740 --> 00:03:43.060 and alcohol abuse. 42 00:03:43.060 --> 00:03:48.980 The mystery to me is not the failure of prohibition, but the sheer insanity of the attempt to do 43 00:03:48.980 --> 00:03:51.180 this in the first place. 44 00:03:51.180 --> 00:03:55.620 It seems utterly bizarre in a country that habitually proclaims its devotion to liberty 45 00:03:55.620 --> 00:04:00.560 and freedom that such a thing would have ever been attempted. 46 00:04:00.560 --> 00:04:06.920 But here is Amendment 18, passed in 1917, in the same epoch in which government was 47 00:04:06.920 --> 00:04:11.820 is going to rid the world of despotism and stabilize all business cycles through scientific 48 00:04:11.820 --> 00:04:14.120 monetary policy. 49 00:04:14.120 --> 00:04:22.240 The manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation 50 00:04:22.240 --> 00:04:28.000 thereof into or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territories subject 51 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:32.920 to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited. 52 00:04:32.920 --> 00:04:41.480 Yes, it really happened, right here, the good old USA, and I'm grateful to Mark Thornton 53 00:04:41.480 --> 00:04:47.100 for documenting the politics and economics of the whole sad affair in his book, The Economics 54 00:04:47.100 --> 00:04:49.420 of Prohibition. 55 00:04:49.420 --> 00:04:55.020 In a rare case of reversion and admission of error, the same constitution was later 56 00:04:55.020 --> 00:04:56.920 amended again. 57 00:04:56.920 --> 00:05:04.360 The 18th Article of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. 58 00:05:04.360 --> 00:05:09.080 But the habit of prohibition was already ingrained. 59 00:05:09.080 --> 00:05:13.440 For the state, it was two steps forward and one step back. 60 00:05:13.440 --> 00:05:18.580 For the rest of the population, what was previously a very normal part of life, drinking potentially 61 00:05:18.580 --> 00:05:24.800 intoxicating liquids, something integral to normal living from the Paleolithic era forward, 62 00:05:24.800 --> 00:05:29.600 took on a special ethos of hypness and daring-do. 63 00:05:29.600 --> 00:05:33.120 The father of our country might have been the largest distiller of whiskey in the late 64 00:05:33.120 --> 00:05:39.520 1700s, but after prohibition, liquor took on associations of decadence and bad behavior 65 00:05:39.520 --> 00:05:40.520 generally. 66 00:05:40.520 --> 00:05:48.120 A distiller today wouldn't be elected to the city council, much less as the US president. 67 00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:52.240 Now it wasn't too many years ago that the laws tended to be a bit more reasonable with 68 00:05:52.240 --> 00:05:55.080 for the Drinking Age Starting at 18. 69 00:05:55.080 --> 00:05:59.940 But that was changed with a universal law for the age of 21, and many people remember 70 00:05:59.940 --> 00:06:01.280 what this was like. 71 00:06:01.280 --> 00:06:07.280 For two years, a person was able to order a beer with a burger, and then, one day, doing 72 00:06:07.280 --> 00:06:11.240 the same thing was a criminal act. 73 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:17.720 Digging around for explanations about these silly laws, there is one overarching argument. 74 00:06:17.720 --> 00:06:19.840 Driving. 75 00:06:19.840 --> 00:06:23.100 We don't want drunken teenagers on the road. 76 00:06:23.100 --> 00:06:27.220 These laws have saved thousands, millions of lives, and the desire to change them is 77 00:06:27.220 --> 00:06:31.700 the equivalent of harboring a death wish for a generation. 78 00:06:31.700 --> 00:06:37.680 Now one libertarian response might be, then get rid of the public roads and let road owners 79 00:06:37.680 --> 00:06:41.960 manage whether and to what extent its drivers drink. 80 00:06:41.960 --> 00:06:45.920 That's a principled position, but a bit impractical. 81 00:06:45.920 --> 00:06:51.300 The biggest problem with that response is that it concedes too much. 82 00:06:51.300 --> 00:06:54.960 The closer you look at these studies, the fishier they appear. 83 00:06:54.960 --> 00:07:00.160 It turns out that most of the declines in binge drinking among high school kids, according 84 00:07:00.160 --> 00:07:05.960 to trends in Drug Use Report, took place before the change in the law and, according to researchers 85 00:07:05.960 --> 00:07:12.320 Jeffrey A. Miron and Elina Tertelbaum, the changes in trends after are heavily biased 86 00:07:12.320 --> 00:07:15.120 by data sampling from a single state. 87 00:07:15.120 --> 00:07:21.060 Therefore, data on drunk driving, whatever the trends, cannot be statistically attributed 88 00:07:21.060 --> 00:07:25.120 to the national minimum drinking age law. 89 00:07:25.120 --> 00:07:30.400 In any case, quote, underage drinking is still sky high, even with the law, making course 90 00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:33.520 in effect even more difficult to trace. 91 00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:38.940 As to why drinking is still high among college students, the National Institute on Drug Abuse 92 00:07:38.940 --> 00:07:42.960 offers the following polite reason. 93 00:07:42.960 --> 00:07:47.560 has provided some insulation from the effects of changes in the drinking age laws that took 94 00:07:47.560 --> 00:07:50.560 place during that interval. 95 00:07:50.560 --> 00:07:53.160 You can say that again. 96 00:07:53.160 --> 00:07:54.600 Human beings are remarkable things. 97 00:07:54.600 --> 00:08:00.560 When they want to do something, no amount of tyranny, even that of jail, can stop them. 98 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:07.480 Still, it is impossible to silence the screams of the prohibition advocates who trace every 99 00:08:07.480 --> 00:08:11.120 car accident among teen drivers to alcohol. 100 00:08:11.120 --> 00:08:15.560 I find this all fascinating to read because it bears so much in common with the prohibition 101 00:08:15.560 --> 00:08:19.920 literature from the 1910s and the 1920s. 102 00:08:19.920 --> 00:08:24.840 Their propaganda blamed alcohol for the destruction of the family, the persistence of poverty, 103 00:08:24.840 --> 00:08:31.960 the high rate of crime, the problem of illiteracy and the ubiquity of sin generally. 104 00:08:31.960 --> 00:08:36.240 Clearly their arguments were widely accepted, even though it is all a big and fallacious 105 00:08:36.240 --> 00:08:38.960 mix-up of cause and effect. 106 00:08:38.960 --> 00:08:43.040 It's not that liquor caused all these terrible things, it's that the people who engage in 107 00:08:43.040 --> 00:08:46.680 terrible behaviours tend also to be drinkers. 108 00:08:46.680 --> 00:08:52.600 Abolishing the drink won't fix the problems of the human heart. 109 00:08:52.600 --> 00:08:58.520 So it is with teenage drinking, with two-thirds or more of people under the age of 21 reporting 110 00:08:58.520 --> 00:09:02.340 that they have consumed alcohol in the past year, it should be obvious that the law is 111 00:09:02.340 --> 00:09:07.860 doing nothing but providing a gigantic excuse for arbitrary police-state impositions on 112 00:09:07.860 --> 00:09:14.460 and Human Liberty, and also socializing young people in a habit of hypocrisy and law-breaking. 113 00:09:14.460 --> 00:09:21.580 It's like the old Soviet-style joke – they pretend to regulate us, and we pretend to 114 00:09:21.580 --> 00:09:22.580 be regulated. 115 00:09:22.580 --> 00:09:28.420 Still, shouldn't it be illegal for young people to drink and drive? 116 00:09:28.420 --> 00:09:35.660 Murray Rothbard sums up the libertarian point in For a New Liberty – only the overt commission 117 00:09:35.660 --> 00:09:38.700 of a crime should be illegal. 118 00:09:38.700 --> 00:09:44.220 And the way to combat crimes committed under the influence of alcohol is to be more diligent 119 00:09:44.220 --> 00:09:48.220 about the crimes themselves, not to outlaw the alcohol. 120 00:09:48.220 --> 00:09:53.060 And this would have the further beneficial effect of reducing crimes not committed under 121 00:09:53.060 --> 00:09:55.820 the influence of alcohol. 122 00:09:55.820 --> 00:10:00.780 We've just been through our annual celebration of Independence Day, the day on which every 123 00:10:00.780 --> 00:10:05.580 Radio and Television Commentator gives pious speeches about the glories of American liberty 124 00:10:05.580 --> 00:10:09.060 and all the sacrifices that have been made to preserve it. 125 00:10:09.060 --> 00:10:12.240 Do we really believe it? 126 00:10:12.240 --> 00:10:17.120 The founders would have never imagined such a thing as a national law regulating the age 127 00:10:17.120 --> 00:10:22.620 at which beer, wine, port and other alcoholic beverages are consumed. 128 00:10:22.620 --> 00:10:27.940 If we are serious about embracing their vision of a free society, as opposed to just blathering 129 00:10:27.940 --> 00:10:33.700 Let's start with something that is supremely practical and would have immediate effects 130 00:10:33.700 --> 00:10:40.700 on an entire generation – repeal the national minimum drinking age law. 131 00:10:40.700 --> 00:10:43.620 You say that this is unthinkable? 132 00:10:43.620 --> 00:10:47.620 I say that you don't really believe in human liberty.