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… is from page 195 of Robert Higgs’s indispensable – and now more relevant than ever – 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan [2]:
The most important legacy of the New Deal, however, is a certain system of belief, the now-dominant ideology of the mixed economy, which holds that the government is an immensely useful means for achieving one’s private aspirations and that one’s resort to this reservoir of potentially appropriable benefits is perfectly legitimate. To take – indirectly if not directly – other people’s property for one’s own benefit is now considered morally impeccable, provided that the taking is effected though the medium of the government.
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