"Each year, therefore, a dollar spent on alcoholic beverages has purchased a smaller quantity"
About this Quote
A single sentence can smuggle an entire political program inside the calm casing of arithmetic. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the famously cautious Canadian prime minister, isn’t moralizing here so much as laundering a moral crusade through the language of purchasing power. “Therefore” does the heavy lifting: it signals that the conclusion is already settled, that the reader is merely being escorted to an inevitable verdict. The focus on “a dollar” turns a contested cultural habit into a neutral household metric, inviting wage-earners and budget-watchers to see drink less as pleasure than as a bad investment.
The phrasing is slyly technocratic. King avoids the heat of temperance rhetoric - sin, vice, broken homes - and instead offers a cool consumer complaint: you’re getting less for your money. That’s a politics of persuasion tailored to a country negotiating modernity, inflation, and social reform in the early 20th century, when debates over prohibition and liquor regulation were often fought not only on ethical grounds but on the supposedly objective terrain of efficiency, productivity, and public order.
The subtext is paternal but strategic: if alcohol is becoming “smaller quantity” per dollar, then abstinence (or stricter control) starts to look like common sense rather than coercion. King’s intent is to make policy feel like thrift, and to make restraint feel like rational self-defense - a quietly powerful move from a leader who understood that Canadians could be nudged more easily by numbers than by sermons.
The phrasing is slyly technocratic. King avoids the heat of temperance rhetoric - sin, vice, broken homes - and instead offers a cool consumer complaint: you’re getting less for your money. That’s a politics of persuasion tailored to a country negotiating modernity, inflation, and social reform in the early 20th century, when debates over prohibition and liquor regulation were often fought not only on ethical grounds but on the supposedly objective terrain of efficiency, productivity, and public order.
The subtext is paternal but strategic: if alcohol is becoming “smaller quantity” per dollar, then abstinence (or stricter control) starts to look like common sense rather than coercion. King’s intent is to make policy feel like thrift, and to make restraint feel like rational self-defense - a quietly powerful move from a leader who understood that Canadians could be nudged more easily by numbers than by sermons.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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