… is from page 182 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s wonderful new (2020) book, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (original emphasis):
A liberalism – no slaves, the right to say no – is built into [Adam] Smith’s argument at the outset. You decide, not the government or the community, not the experts or the masters. You know best how to “economize” in using your own capital. It is a reasonable assumption, but one that all the statists firmly deny. And they deny that anyway an adult should in equal dignity be assumed to choose wisely – even if on occasion that adult does not. But the problem with statism is that only by an imposed assumption of political and administrative perfection will the general will choose better than the individual does. And always the statist general will takes away the dignity of individual choice. The general is a nasty master.
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