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Moonshine is still around, and still pretty good. One problem, not on this particular case, is making moonshine for your own consumption illegal? If the government taxes that, will they soon be taxing the vegetables I grow in the garden?

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile..private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. This is the tendancy of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it's train wretchedness and oppression." -- Thomas Jefferson

I didnt know it was possible to so totally miss a point. For every man who drinks moonshine, there are a thousand who don't. Legalization of alcohol isnt supposed to toatally eliminate the demand for bad alcohol, it is supposed to allow the supply of good alcohol (if i may use the strange term) to be supplied to the people who would demand it. Why force people demanding good alcohol to drink bad alcohol by keeping it illegal? the exact same situation would apply to drugs. Some people smart enough to do "regulated", official drugs would be able to get their fix much more safely than they can now.

I have no doubt that the story is true. Moonshine is a TRADITION in that area. You also have to keep in mind that it is one of the poorest areas of our nation, and these people have struggled for survival for generations. If you really want to learn about the area, read the FOX FIRE books; they are a how-to series of how the people of Apalachia have done for themselves, and even include a section on how to make, run, and hide a still. Since the "revenuer's" as the natives call them are going after the current manufacturers of moonshine so heavily, it is too bad they can't take the proceeds from past illegal 'shine sales. Old Joe Kennedy got his start running illegal alcohol during prohibition! MARK A SITY www.logic101.net