Prohibitions.

• Author: Hall, Joshua

* Prohibitions Edited by John Meadowcroft London: Institute for Economic Affairs, 2008. Pp. 269. $33.95 paperback.

Prohibitions, edited by John Meadowcroft, was written for the educated layperson. Examining prohibition through the eyes of several authors from different disciplines, this volume concerns itself with government restrictions (or complete outlawing) of the production or sale of certain goods and services. Thus, it covers, for example, both alcohol prohibition and limitations on the sale of pharmaceuticals.

In the introductory chapter, Meadowcroft describes the approach taken in the volume and summarizes the resulting policy lessons. He discusses the well-known secondary effects of prohibition: black markets, increased risk, the criminalization of noncriminals, and the diversion of resources away from protecting others (instead of protecting people from harming themselves). Given that not all of these lessons are drawn out in each chapter, the introduction provides a useful framework for thinking about each of the topics independently of the material presented in a particular chapter.

In chapter 2, Martin Ricketts and Geoffrey Wood provide an overview of the economics of prohibition. Although they give us a well-written introduction to the arguments used to justify prohibition, the book would have benefitted from a clearer distinction between arguments used in favor of prohibition and explanations of why certain prohibitions exist. For example, on page 38 when Ricketts and Wood ask, "Why, then, do we observe prohibitions?" we might expect them to give a public-choice explanation. Although they hint that politics, not economic arguments about efficiency or paternalism, often accounts for prohibitions, they might have set the stage for the rest of the book more helpfully had they made this distinction more explicitly. The authors of several chapters discuss the politics of prohibition, and an early statement about the distinction between market failure and government failure would have put these discussions in a more comprehensible context.

The book's third chapter, on recreational drugs, is by Mark Thornton and Simon Bowmaker. Thornton is one of the foremost economists studying prohibition, as his dissertation and his subsequent book on the economics of prohibition demonstrate (The Economics of Prohibition [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991]), and this chapter does not disappoint. After presenting a brief history of...