Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 113 of the 2000 Liberty Fund edition of Frederic William Maitland’s profound 1875 dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge, A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality:

If the conventional theory leads to an ideally perfect democracy – a state in which all that the majority wishes to be law, and nothing else, is law – then it leads to a form of government under which the arbitrary exercise of power is most certainly possible. Thus, as it progresses, the conventional theory seems to lose its title to be called the doctrine of civil liberty, for it ceases to be a protest against arbitrary forms of restraint.