If ever there was a single policy that represented everything wrong with government, it was Prohibition. The Noble Experiment, in which booze was banned in America for 13 years, was a testbed for practically every awful domestic policy: restrictions on what individuals can consume and put in their bodies, demands that businesses large and small cease or alter their operations, an overbearing police state, and even tax policy. A decade-plus of alcohol restrictions also made drinks and drink culture a lot worse.
Prohibition was enacted under the premise that government knows best—and that it should enforce that knowledge at the point of a gun. The result was one of the most socially and economically corrosive policies in American history.
