… is from page 168 of Virginia Postrel’s marvelous 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies:
In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own.
This reality is one reason, I believe, that so many intellectual elites as well as politicians and “activists” do not like free markets. People acting on their own do not need “leaders.” Yet those who yearn to be “leaders” (or to advise “leaders”) need flocks to lead; they need people who are eager, or at least willing, to replace their own judgments with those of their “leaders.” In short, shepherds need sheep.
