… is from page 361 of Frank Knight‘s monumental 1921 book, Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit:
The real trouble with bureaucracies is not that they are rash, but the opposite. When not actually rotten with dishonesty and corruption, they universally show a tendency to “play safe” and become hopelessly conservative. The great danger to be feared from a political control of economic life under ordinary conditions is not a reckless dissipation of the social resources so much as the arrest of progress and the vegetation of life.
