… is one of Frederic Bastiat’s incisive critiques of the nanny-state. It’s found on page 435 of Frederic Bastiat, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics (Liberty Fund, 2011); it is from an essay that originally appeared in 1848, entitled “Laissez-faire”:
This is simply absurd. Do you seriously have such faith in human wisdom that you want universal sufferage and government of all by all and then you proclaim these very men whom you consider fit to govern others unfit to govern themselves?
