… is from page 121 of the 1992 collection of some of William Graham Sumner’s best essays, On Liberty, Society, and Politics (Roger C. Bannister, ed.); specifically, this quotation is from Sumner’s January 1881 Princeton Review essay, “The Argument against Protective Taxes”:
A wants protection; that is, he wants B’s money. B does not want to let him have it. A talks sentiment and metaphysics finely, and, after all, all there is in it is that he wants B’s money.
Just so. No better and more concise description of protectionism has ever been penned.
Is it not mind-boggling that such a devious means of picking people’s pockets (and threatening to cage or shoot them if they resist too strenuously) is championed by “Progressives” who think themselves to be liberal and peaceful, as well as by conservatives who think themselves to be friends of rugged individualism and of free markets?
