… is from page 37 of Benjamin Rogge’s October 1968 speech “In Honor of Leonard Read’s Seventieth Birthday,” as this speech is reprinted in A Maverick’s Defense of Freedom, the 2010 collection of Rogge’s essays that is edited by Dwight Lee:
For most of us, it is only with age, if ever, that we acquire the wisdom to be content to live under always imperfect rules that still permit us imperfect men to make our own imperfect decisions, with consequences for each man and for all men that no one can fully predict and that will always be something less than the New Jerusalem.
DBx: Or as Harold Demsetz might remind us, be very careful never to commit the Nirvana fallacy.
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