… is from page 97 of Moral Science and Moral Order, which is Vol. 17 of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan; specifically, it’s from Jim’s 1977 essay “Law and the Invisible Hand”:
If the continuing availability of tomato juice is brought to the level of political consciousness, either by the chance occurrence of some exogenous event or by the deliberate effort of a demagogue, the economic illiterate would quite naturally tend to embrace governmental controls purportedly aimed at insuring stability in supply (of tomato juice or of anything else). The whole raison d’être of economics, as a discipline with some didactic purpose, lies in its potential for reducing to a minimum the numbers of persons who remain illiterate in this sense.
