… is from page 281 of Frank Knight’s 1950 Presidential address to the American Economic Association – an address titled “The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics” – as this address is slightly modified and reprinted in the 1956 collection of several of Knight’s papers and speeches, On the History and Method of Economics:
I mistrust reformers. When a man or group asks for “power to do good,” my impulse is to say, “Oh, yeah, who ever wanted power for any other reason, and what have they done when they got it?” So, I instinctively want to cancel the last three words, leaving simply, “I want power”; that is easy to believe. And a further confession: I am reluctant to believe in doing good with power anyhow.
DBx: The world would be much safer and more peaceful, as well as more prosperous, if more people regularly exercised this simple but profound bit of wisdom as here explained by Knight.
