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… is to mark the 130th anniversary of the birth of John Maynard Keynes [2]; 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 [3] (James M. Buchanan [4], 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 [5] 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.