Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 17 of the late Ronald Max Hartwell’s 1983 paper “The Origins of Capitalism: A Methodological Essay,” which is chapter 2 of the excellent 1983 collection, edited by the late Steve Pejovich, Philosophical and Economic Foundations of Capitalism (footnotes omitted; link added):

In particular, as Fritz Machlup has pointed out, the growth of freedoms depended crucially on the removal of coercive restraints which the state used to restrict the freedom of individuals. The essential result of all these changes was, in the words of F.H. Knight, “the liberation of both men and things from the prescriptions of authority and tradition.” Only then could economic enterprise function with maximum efficiency and the increasingly productive allocation of resources be assured.