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… is from page 355 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 collection of Frédéric Bastiat [2]’s writings, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics [3] – which is the first volume in what will eventually be six volumes, expertly edited by David Hart, of The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat [4]; specifically, this quotation is drawn from Bastiat’s 1846 letter “To the Electors of the District of Saint-Sever”:
Government power, a vast, organized, and living body, naturally tends to grow. It feels cramped within its supervisory mission. Now, its growth is hardly possible without a succession of encroachments upon the field of individual rights. The expansion of government power means usurping some form of private activity, transgressing the boundary that I set earlier between what is and what is not its essential function.