Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 354 of Robert Higgs’s 1999 Constitutional Political Economy paper, “On Ackerman’s Justification of Irregular Constitutional Change: Is Any Vice You Get Away With a Virtue?” as this paper is reprinted as Chapter 38 of the excellent 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:

[T]he New Deal itself [was] a vast vote-buying scheme. But whereas the “economic royalists” used their own money to buy votes, the New Dealers, true to their democratic pretensions, used the public’s money. Can anyone doubt that handing out doles from the federal treasury on a wholly unprecedented scale, not to speak of the other forms of benefits dispensed, made a material contribution to the electoral success of the Democrats from 1934 through 1940?