… is from page 283 of Harold Demsetz’s 1988 collection Ownership, Control, and the Firm; specifically, it is from his essay “The Meaning of Freedom”:
The possession of power increases the wealth of its possessor, but the possession of wealth does not in itself increase the ability of a person to limit the scope of action enjoyed by others. Coercion may be directly correlated with power and inversely with freedom; yet, because power is not necessarily correlated with wealth, freedom bears no necessary relationship to wealth.
In a society built chiefly upon classical-liberal tenets, Bill Gates is no more free than I am.
