This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, December 2nd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It may come as some surprise to learn that the prohibition of alcohol has been tried in many parts of the world.

The results though are in many ways exactly what you would expect.

That's according to author Mark Schrod, the book is Smashing the Liquor Machine.

We spoke last month.

When you hear descriptions of American prohibition and your book goes into the experiences of

attempts at attempts of

of differing quality of prohibition around the world.

What do most Americans either not understand

or what do they understand that that is just incorrect?

Well there's a whole lot that goes to it. I think at the core of it though is that it's been

positioned and repositioned so many times into something of a sort of

of cultural politics that you know prohibitionist were Bible thumpers moralizing know, who wanted to take away your freedom to drink and tell you what

thou shalt and shalt not drink and do with your lives.

And so yeah, so for a long time I was curious about you know the

conventional wisdom for prohibition and again my focus is not so much as an American historian or anything along those lines.

You know, my interest is in comparative history and Russian history and whatnot.

So when it comes to the conventional wisdom of why we had prohibition in this country,

again, the usual explanation is that it was about sort of

of Midwestern evangelical Bible thumpers, you know,

and sort of this cultural backlash against modernization and immigration.

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