Tweet [1]
… is from pages 8-9 of the 1991 Liberty Press edition of Bruno Leoni’s 1961 volume, Freedom and the Law [2]:
People behave as if their need for individual initiative and individual choice were almost completely satisfied by the fact of their personal access to the benefits of scientific and technological achievements. Strangely enough, their corresponding needs for individual initiative and individual decision in the political and legal spheres seems to be met by ceremonial and almost magical procedures such as elections of “representatives” who are supposed to know by some mysterious inspiration what their constituents really want and to be able to decide accordingly. True, individuals still have, at least in the Western world, the possibility of deciding and acting as individuals in many respects: in trading (at least to a great extent), in speaking, in personal relations, and in many other kinds of social intercourse. However, they seem also to have accepted in principle once and for all a system whereby a handful of people whom they rarely know personally are able to decide what everybody must do, and this within very vaguely defined limits or practically without limits at all.