Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 3 of Robert Hessen’s Introduction to the 1981 collection Does Big Business Rule America? (R. Hessen, ed.); this collection is of critical commentaries on Charles E. Lindblom’s atrociously bad 1977 book, Politics and Markets:

[Charles] Lindblom believes that the suppression of individual liberty and economic freedom is unobjectionable if the political processes in a country are democratic. Although he prefers a democratic system to a dictatorship, he does not notice that the difference is bogus if all decisions are to be made in the political arena. If private spheres of action and opportunity are to be outlawed, it scarcely matters whether the dictator is one man – Mao Tse-tung, for example – or a majority of the voters. The results are identical: individuals are not free to pursue their own interests, to engage in peaceful cooperation and exchange with each other, or to reap the benefits of their own ingenuity and industriousness.