whiskey: the patriotic spirit

Three things made me curious about the Whiskey Rebellion:

1. Murray Rothbard's essay;
2. L. Neil Smith's first novel;
3. Man, I love whiskey!

OK, actually, I can think of a 4th: on our honeymoon hiking in the Scottish Highlands, my beautiful new bride and I visited a couple of distilleries, which gave tours, explained the history, explained the process, then steered us into the gift shop. I learned that Irish whiskey (spelled with an 'e') is triple-distilled, whereas Scottish whisky (no 'e') is double-distilled. (Notice that Canada, which is more Scottish than Irish, has whisky, whereas we in these here United States are far more Irish than Scottish and have whiskey with an 'e'.)

I learned that the Scots import their whisky barrels from Kentucky, because the Kentucky legislature passed protectionist laws on behalf of the coopers' unions, making it illegal to reuse bourbon barrels. There's no good reason not to reuse bourbon barrels, but Kentucky distilleries aren't allowed to do it. So they sell them cheap to Scottish distilleries. The fanciest single-malt scotch you've ever had probably aged in a burnt-out, used bourbon barrel. (They also use French burgundy barrels, possibly for similar reasons.)

I learned what single-malt means, and why the market has made "blended whiskies" (a mix of malt whisky and grain alcohol) more popular: cheaper and less risky to make; same alcoholic effect. Once upon a time, all Scottish whisky was what we now call single-malt: whisky made from a single batch of malted grain.

I learned that after distilling, whisky is clear, like water. It takes its brown color from sitting in charred barrels for however many years -- takes on the color of the wood. Distillery workers used to be paid, in addition to the money they took home, "three whites and a goldy" -- meaning 3 shots of the thoroughly harsh, unaged product, plus 1 shot of the younger version of the final product. The British government has made that illegal, so to approximate tradition, the distilleries give their workers bonus bottles of the post-taxed stuff.

Taxes, of course, being the heart of the matter. Because whisky is scarce and valuable by volume, does not lose its value over time, and is divisible (fungible), it makes a pretty good money. I've noted elsewhere that 2 common commodity moneys that arise in local markets that lack precious metals are (1) tobacco, and (2) booze. In the fairly limited markets of rural Britain (and Ireland), farmers traded in whisk(e)y.
Unfortunately, what makes something a good money for markets also makes it good plunder for governments. The English (government soldiers) and the Scottish (farmers and distillers) fought long and hard over the individual's right to make and keep (or trade) his own whisky. The individuals lost. This picture to the left is of something called a "spirit safe". Good term, I think. It's a lockbox on the distillery premises to which only government agents hold the key. Because the distilling process requires human handling and human judgment to keep only the middle 90% of the flow of a batch of whisky (the beginning and end of the flow having different and less pleasant color and taste), and because the government doesn't want any whisky in human hands until after it's been taxed, they came up with this device, which lets the distillery worker see and handle the flow of the whisky without being able to actually touch it.

Not only does the distillery itself (the device, not the place) have to be registered with the government, but it has to be huge -- industrial scale. The existence of a 'still small enough to fit inside a room is itself illegal in Britain. Small enough for personal use is small enough to hide, and a hidden still means someone isn't paying taxes on every last drop of alcohol on the island.

If you've ever spent $40 on a decent bottle of single-malt scotch, you were paying about $10 in American taxes and $20 in British taxes. Only 1/4 of the price of scotch is for the scotch itself. Three times as much is for the taxes to various governments.

The US government was never quite as successful, thank goodness. The textbook version of the Whiskey Rebellion has the rebellion itself take place in a handful of counties in Pennsylvania. El Neil's Probability Broach takes place in an alternative timeline where the rebels won, General Washington was defeated, and the original vision of the Declaration of Independence continued to be the dominant ideology for the next two centuries.

Murray Rothbard suggests that the Whiskey Rebellion itself was much larger than the textbook version would have it. It crossed many states, up and down the mid-Atlantic and as far west as Ohio, and the rebels won! The handful-of-Pennsylvania-counties version is where the rebellion was successfully put down by Washington's soldiers, but as Rothbard has it, the government knew that the resistance was much larger, more widespread, and anonymous. They knew they could never really defeat it. So instead they declared victory and gave up. American whiskey continued to be made and consumed extralegally for over a century.

I haven't gotten far enough in Thomas Slaughter's book, The Whiskey Rebellion, to know whether his version is closer to the textbook version or to Murray Rothbard's revision, but I have read enough to note something very curious. The American frontiersmen who would become the whiskey rebels held to an ideological distinction they inherited from England: the idea that "external taxes" (meaning tariffs) were legitimate (!) while "internal taxes" (meaning everything else) were illegitimate. This distinction they held to be central to the American Revolution itself. So when the American government began to impose an excise tax on whiskey (an internal tax), these patriots saw their own government as violating their rights, exactly as the British had done.

What's the difference? Aren't both taxes involuntary? Isn't that what makes them taxes?

Well, there's a pragmatic distinction I'll get to in a moment, but there was also an ideological distinction that I think I follow, even as I reject it. Englishmen, both in Britain and in America, considered the borders of their countries to be the legitimate property of their governments. Tariffs were seen as fees, legitimately collected for the privilege of crossing (and therefore using) government property. Excise taxes, on the other hand, were claims that the government was making on goods that were decidedly not the government's property -- goods the government had played no part in creating and over which the government held no legitimate claim, even under the spurious doctrine of legitimate government ownership. (Unless, as I've noted elsewhere, you think the government really owns everything -- a common enough implicit assumption now, but very alien to Anglo-Americans for most of our history.)

I'm a big fan of Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" as a precursor of American anarchism, but he makes a similar statist assumption, as illustrated by this quote:

If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it.

(Notice that Thoreau implies that the ports are rightfully government property.)

Thoreau has a lot in common with the whiskey rebels. For one thing, they were literalists. Thoreau took Thomas Jefferson's dictum -- "That government is best which governs least" -- and carried it to its logical conclusion: "That government is best which governs not at all"!

Similarly, the rebels quoted the language of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence as justification for their rebellion. And unlike the commies who would do so a century or so later, the American rebels weren't distorting the meaning. They just took the language literally. The American mercantile class turned out not to mean any of it. They wanted to be the British.

But then both Thoreau and the rebels accepted (and excepted) tariffs, which violate the Jeffersonian language Thoreau and the whiskey rebels embraced. (Jefferson too violated the Jeffersonian ideal, not just in his slave ownership, but in his political use of tariffs once he was president.)

The one thing that helps me sympathize with the excise rebels (and Thoreau) is the idea that once upon a time, you could largely ignore a government funded only by tariffs. The frontiersman weren't exporting agriculture and they didn't depend on imported machinery. Before the excise taxes, they could live ungoverned -- in the statist sense, not the cybernetic sense.

They were wrong (like Thoreau) to see the State as the rightful owner of the borders, but they were right to see government as better limited than unlimited, and the excise was the beginning of the end of such limits.