… is from page 30 of Tomas Larsson’s 2001 book, The Race to the Top:
As Disraeli noted, “Protectionism is not a principle but an expedient.”
DBx: There are those who, out of sheer economic ignorance, believe that in principle artificially intensified scarcity makes people richer. In contrast, there are those who, having no use for principles, focus only on the immediate and the seen; in doing so these ‘practical’ folk undermine both the future and the unseen in order to make that which is visible today as pretty as possible according to their lights.
And crony capitalists are ever happy to turn the ignorance of the first group, and the hubris of the second, into support for government restrictions that enrich these ‘capitalists’ at the greater expense of the general public.
