… is from page 140 of the 2005 Liberty Fund printing of the 1974 2nd edition of Arthur Seldon’s Everyman’s Dictionary of Economics:
Man is both consumer and producer; but his interest as producer is immediate and obvious, his interest as consumer distant and diffuse. The two conflict sharply: the interest of consumers is to replace uneconomic coal-pits by profitable pits or by other sources of power; the interest of miners is to keep all mines working whatever their cost or efficiency. The case for consumers’ (rather than producers’) sovereignty is that, to safeguard his interest as producer, man would be tempted to stultify change by suppressing invention, new methods and ideas; the result would be stagnation and ultimately impoverishment.
