Daily Inspiration Quote by Al Capone

Spoken with the deadpan pragmatism of a man cashing the checks of public virtue, "Prohibition has made nothing but trouble" is Capone laundering self-interest into civic complaint. The line works because it performs a neat inversion: a policy sold as moral uplift becomes, in his telling, a generator of disorder. He isn’t arguing about temperance; he’s arguing about governance, implicitly grading the state on outcomes rather than intentions.

The specific intent is tactical. Capone positions himself less as predator than as reluctant middleman caught in a mess lawmakers created. If Prohibition is the problem, then the bootlegger becomes a symptom - even, perversely, a service provider responding to demand. It’s an early, street-level version of the argument modern politicians still make when policies backfire: don’t blame the market actor, blame the rule.

The subtext is sharper: "trouble" is doing double duty. It gestures at real public costs - violence, corruption, hollowed-out respect for law - while also naming Capone’s personal inconveniences: raids, rivals, heat from feds, the constant labor of keeping police on payroll. He’s not confessing guilt; he’s advertising the policy’s impotence.

Context seals the irony. The 18th Amendment didn’t erase drinking; it professionalized it. Prohibition created a black market with margins fat enough to fund gangs, weapons, and political influence. Capone’s sentence is almost a business memo from the era when America tried to legislate desire and accidentally scaled up organized crime into an industry.