Eight Million Sots in the Naked City.

• Author: Boudreaux, Donald J.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

I enjoyed Jackson Kuhl's review of books on alcohol prohibition ("Eight Million Sots in the Naked City," November). Greater wartime centralization of power in Washington, along with hostility to the Irish and Italians, surely helped fuel Uncle Sam's willingness to declare alcohol verboten. But the spark that ignited Prohibition goes unmentioned by Kuhl and, apparently, by the authors whose books he reviews. That spark was the national income tax.

Prior to the 1914 creation of the income tax, taxing alcohol was second only to taxing imports as a source of federal revenue. So when, during World War I, the income tax proved to be a revenue-gathering megastar, Congress finally could afford to cave in to the dry lobby. By 1919 the sacrificed...