… is from page 53 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and still-important 1937 book, The Good Society (footnote deleted):
There has been no point in the expansion of tariffs, bounties, bureaucracies, inspectors, censors, police, and armies, no point in the contraction of markets, the disintegration of states, the disunion of ethnic groups – no point at which the collectivists have been able to say: “Thus far and no further.”
How can they say so? The application of their principles creates such disorder that they are never without warrant for redoubling the dose. Without abandoning their central doctrine, how can they refuse to invoke the state as savior when there is obviously so much evil that should be remedied? They have no other principle they can invoke. Like the secret of some ancient art, they have lost the principles of freedom.
