… is from page 306 of the 1997 collection of some of my late, great teacher Leland Yeager’s finest essays, The Fluttering Veil (George Selgin, ed.); specifically, it’s from Leland’s 1971 AEI pamphlet, “Monetary Policy: Before and After the Freeze” (original emphasis):
Theories of bureaucracy and politics give ample reason for skepticism about the ability of government to perform any function well.
DBx: Pictured here (left to right) are Warren Nutter (partially obscured), Gordon Tullock, and Leland Yeager. This image is from a photo taken in Rouss Hall of University of Virginia economists in November 1962. Among others in the larger photo are Jim Buchanan and Ronald Coase. It was a remarkable faculty, later to be dismembered by leftist ideologues at the Ford Foundation and in UVA’s upper administration.