Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 42 of Robert Higgs’s 1996 essay “Public Choice and Political Leadership” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 5 of the excellent 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan (link added):

Of all the accounts of political leadership I have read, most of which obsequiously endorse the myths propagated by the master class itself, the best is anthropologist F. G. Bailey’s Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Bailey gets right to the point by noting in his preface that “leaders and gangsters have much in common” (p. xiii). Of course, political leaders are much more ambitious than gangsters. The latter are content to take your money, whereas the former, besides taking far more of your money, have the effrontery to violate your just rights whenever their convenience dictates and even to anticipate your gratitude for their compassionate devotion to your welfare.