Replies

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

If the government taxes that, will they soon be taxing the vegetables I grow in the garden?

You want to give the bastards any more brilliant ideas or something? *wink*

When I was in the Air Force, I first lived in the lower apartment of a two-family home. The couple upstairs was another Air Force couple; the wife often spoke of her father in Tennessee making prime 'shine. Sure enough, she brought us a jug of the stuff. As Jackie Gleason used to say, mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-boy! was that good booze! Not good enough to make me switch from my beloved bourbon, but very good, indeed!

Moonshine is still around, and still pretty good. One problem, not on this particular case, is making moonshine for your own consumption illegal?

Distilling your own alcohol is still illegal; you have to get all kinds of permits and pay lots of taxes.

You can brew your own beer, wine, cider, mead, and other fermented alcoholic beverages, for your own personal use (they changed the law to allow this some time back in the 70's or 80's). For some reason, the federales did not legalize home distilling when they legalized home brewing. I guess they figured that the BATF might get pissed off if they removed one of "their" prime reasons for existing.

One can't help thinking that if home distilling were legal, that what little moonshining that remained would virtually disappear. There can't be that much of an economic incentive to moonshine; legal booze is pretty darn cheap as is. Nostalgia for moonshine could be quickly cured by hobbiests allowed to legally set up their own home stills for purely home consumption.

One problem, not on this particular case, is making moonshine for your own consumption illegal?

I don't think making it for yourself is illegal but I'm not sure. I know it's legal to homebrew beer, even in Utah. You're not supposed to sell it but you can give it away. And you can't give it to anybody under age.