… is to mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes; specifically, the quotation is from pages 130-131 of my colleague-emeritus Charles Rowley’s essay “John Maynard Keynes and the Attack on Classical Political Economy,” which is chapter 7 in the 1987 collection Deficits (James M. Buchanan, Charles K. Rowley, & Robert D. Tollison, eds.); Charles here references Keynes’s 1924 lecture The End of Laissez-Faire (link added):
Perhaps understandably, in the absence of any public choice perception, Keynes made no reference, either then or later, to the special interests that would dictate the pattern of government intervention once the political market was unleashed from its laissez-faire constraints. But, he had no excuse, whatsoever, other than Harvey Road elitism, for ignoring the warnings of Hume, Smith and Mill concerning the self-seeking corruption endemic in an extended polity.
