Tweet [1]
… is from page 277 of Volume 2 (“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings [2], 2012) of Liberty Fund’s The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat; specifically, it’s the opening line of Bastiat’s June 1847 essay “The War Against Chairs of Political Economy”:
We know with what bitterness men who restrict the trade of others for their own advantage complain that political economy stubbornly refuses to extol the merit of these restrictions.
From the start, economists – including the eloquent Adam Smith [3] – have exposed the pretensions and illogical arguments of cronyist domestic producers who seek unearned profits from government restrictions on consumers’ freedoms to spend their money as they, consumers, choose.