… is from pages 214-215 of University of Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz’s profound essay “Adam Smith on Freedom,” which is chapter 13 in Ryan Patrick Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (2016) (original emphasis):
[R]eins of power come at a price. Anyone acquiring the reins will be a person to whom such power is worth the price. Moreover, the more power there is to acquire, the more it will be worth, the more people must invest to acquire it, and thus the more that such power gets concentrated in the hands of people intent on using it for all that it is worth. So, the process by which people gain political appointment will systematically tend, and increasingly tend, to select the wrong person for the job.
