Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 13 of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Felix Morley‘s 1959 volume, Freedom and Federalism:

The merit of a supervisory, as opposed to a directive, state, is that the former keeps “the power in the people,” (to use the phrase of William Penn). Our [American] system encourages the individual to exertion for his own sake, instead of requiring exertion by an elite in behalf of the masses, which is the principle of communism and of national socialism put in the most favorable light.

DBx: Indeed so. And of course in any system in which members of an ‘elite,’ holding government power, ostensibly exert themselves on behalf of the masses, these ‘elite’ will order the masses to exert themselves, in principle, on behalf of the greater good but, in practice, on behalf of the ‘elite.’