Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 44 of John Dos Passos’s 1958 paper “A Question of Elbow Room,” which is Essay 1 in Essays on Individuality, Felix Morley, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1977 [1958]):

Somewhere along the way we lost our conviction that the best government was self-government. In our enthusiasm for turning over every social problem to the administrative bureaucracy for solution, we forgot that democracy is based on the maxim that the solution of the problem of social life is the business of the people themselves. Neither [Thomas Babington] Macaulay nor Jefferson, when they scanned the horizon for dangers threatening American democracy, foresaw this prodigious growth of a bureaucracy armed with police powers, a bureaucracy which bids fair to become a vested interest in its own right.