As I understand it in the UK towards the end of the nineteenth century the Temprance movement was actually supported politically most by the Liberals (ie "proper" liberals in the UK sense of classical liberalism). Apart from the fact that the party was greatly influenced by Welsh Methodists who were religiously tee-totallers, the economic argument was that the brewers were monopolies that operated in order to fleece the working classes of their wages through the "coercion" of intoxication. Every town had its monopolistic brewer, owned by some local big-wig family of the privileged few. It was only a bit later, when the "social democratic liberals" started to do their research on the causes of poverty in the big cities that it became a moralizing issue.