… is from page 240 of George Will’s 2021 volume, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in Newsweek on September 12th, 2008):
The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation – the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize – is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.