An old Joseph Sobran essay from his National Review days:

A political and legal system has to be based on the moral habits of its citizens, if it is concerned with anything more than power. To say that “that government is best which governs least” is not to yearn for anarchy: it is to say that those laws are best that don’t require a huge apparatus of surveillance and enforcement. The foolishness of Prohibition was that it pitted the law against deep-rooted ways of life. Socialism makes the same mistake on an even larger scale. As Burke puts it, “I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.”