Nearly a century ago, the immortal Albert Jay Nock decanted one of the most potent condemnations of prohibition ever committed to print. Nock described the prohibitionist impulse as “simply unworthy of a free people, and, being unworthy [is] soon found intolerable.” He rebuked prohibitionists for their “hatreds, fanaticisms, inaccessibility to ideas … inflamed and cancerous interest in the personal conduct of others …. hysterical disregard of personal rights [and their] pure faith in force….” Those traits, he concluded, “characterize and animate a civilization that the general experience of mankind at once condemns as impossible, and as hateful as it is impossible.” The … Continue reading All Hail the Bootlegger