Imagine a world where the government is about to regulate wages so that top incomes are no more than ten times the lowest. Imagine you’re earning a really high salary, as a banker let’s say. Imagine your salary will be cut and your bonuses capped.
Ideologically you believe in the absolute purity of money, you believe it shouldn’t be interfered with and you believe you have every right to make as much of it as you can.
What we consider acceptable today was different five years ago, very different twenty years ago and unrecognisable a hundred years ago.
How does it happen?
As ever, I’m coming at this from a lay-person’s point of view. I have nothing more than an average understanding of the law, so please read on in that spirit.
To prohibit is defined in the dictionary as the act to forbid by authority or law. Prohibition is often used to define a period when alcohol is prohibited, but I’m going to use it as a general term for the legal prohibition of anything.
There are lots of things that are prohibited and the law is there to make sure we obey. Some of these are obvious and talked about semi-openly in public, such as drug prohibition. Some are so built into the fabric of our society that we don’t even recognise them as prohibition. For example, public nudity which is described by the CPS as, “…acting in a way that does not conform to the normal standards of society that require people to be clothed in public…”