Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 221-222 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s remarkably profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:

Nothing is more attractive to the benevolent vanity of men than the notion that they can effect great improvement in society by the simple process of forbidding all wrong conduct, or conduct which they think is wrong, by law, and of enjoining all good conduct by the same means; as if men could not find out how to live until a book were placed in the hands of every individual, in which the things to be done and those not to be done were clearly set down.