… is from page 337 of Thomas Sowell’s magnificent 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions:
To “solve” [through government] some social “problem” is (1) to move the locus of social decision making from systemic processes of reciprocal interaction to intentional processes of unilateral or hierarchical directives, (2) to change the mode of communication and control from fungible and therefore incrementally variable media (emotional ties, money, etc.) to categorical priorities selected by a subset of a population for the whole population, and (3) because of the diversity of human values, which make any given set of tangible results highly disparate in value terms (financial or moral), pervasive uncompensated changes through force are likely to elicit pervasive resistance and evasion, which can only be overcome by more force – which is to say, less freedom.
