… is from page 19 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s essay “Pessimistically Optimistic about the Future,” which appears in the excellent 2016 collection Future: Economic Peril or Prosperity? (Robert M. Whaples, Christopher J. Coyne, and Michael C. Munger, eds.):
We systematically underestimate the costs of blocking trading opportunities with one another and of curtailing the creative powers of the entrepreneurial spirit, and we systematically overstate the benefits of attempting to curb the excesses of self-interest through collective action by state power.