… is from page 49 of Henry Simons’s posthumous 1948 collection, Economic Policy for a Free Society; specifically, it’s from Simons’s once-famous 1934 pamphlet, A Positive Program for Laissez Faire, as this pamphlet is reprinted in this volume:
Another major factor in the inefficient allocation of resources is to be found in government regulation and interference. Tariff legislation is the main case in point, for the protective tariff is essentially a device for forcing resources from uses of higher to uses of lower productivity.
DBx: Indeed so. Yet Trump is convinced, as are his followers, that forcing American workers and resources into lower-productivity uses, and thus preventing them from being employed in higher-productivity uses, will make the American economy grow and enrich the American masses. It’s an old delusion.
