Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground.

Prohibition begets proliferation

Illegal stills had always been plentiful in the South, so Prohibition there did not have the bite that it had in the North.

A bootlegger is a bootlegger, a scalper is a scalper.

I believe I've always been so successful on the black market for a lot of different reasons.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern-day Western.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.

When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.

When Prohibition was first enacted in 1920, most people stockpiled alcohol, thinking they'd have enough to last them for years. By 1923, that was starting to run out, so your average person started to rely more and more on criminals.

The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market... the higher the black market price.

Bootleggers quake in fear of me ringing them on a Sunday afternoon. I call after dinner, usually.

Liquor - you can make it illegal but you can't make it unpopular.

It's a losing proposition, but one you can't refuse. It's the politics of contraband, it's the smuggler's blues.

Some call it bootlegging. Some call it racketeering. I call it a business.

I was playing birthday parties. House-rent parties where they used to sell whisky during prohibition.

I have read a great deal of economic theory for over 50 years now, but have found only one economic "law" to which I can find NO exceptions: Where the State prevents a free market, by banning any form of goods or services, consumer demand will create a black market for those goods or services, at vastly higher prices. Can YOU think of a single exception to this law?

I can see none of you are smugglers; that's why it's so loud.

Once the government starts forbidding things, then someone will come around the corner saying, “I’ve got it.”

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.

When I was fighting, there was no boxing in Saudi Arabia because it was forbidden.

Hyesan people have money, the most after those in Pyongyang, because it's near the border with China. Illegal smuggling businesses and Chinese trading companies operate there, so people can access outside products.

If something or someone is being banned, I want to be among the first to know about it.

Black markets exist any time there is a profit to be made.