… is from pages 149-150 of the 1998 edition of Wilhelm Ropke’s 1957 tract, A Humane Economy:
The true task of economics appears to me to be quite different, especially in a modern mass democracy. Its unglamorous but all the more useful mission is to make the logic of things heard in the midst of the passions and interests of public life, to bring to light inconvenient facts and relationships, to weigh everything and assign it due place, to prick bubbles and expose illusions and confusions, and to counter political enthusiasm and its possible aberrations with economic reason and demagogy with truth.
