… is from page 496 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:
Even more effective disguises for international trade restrictions are health and safety rules applied to imports – rules which often go far beyond what is necessary for either health or safety. Mere red tape requirements can also grow to the point where the time needed to comply adds enough costs to be prohibitive, especially for perishable imports. If it takes a week to get your strawberries through customs, you may as well not ship them. All these measures, which have been engaged in by countries around the world, share with import quotas the political advantage that it is hard to quantify precisely their effect on consumer prices, however large that effect may be.
