… is from page 421 of Deirdre McCloskey’s stupendous 2010 volume, Bourgeois Dignity:
If local envy and protection and interest and keeping the peace between users of old and new technologies are allowed to call the shots, then innovation and the modern world is blocked.
DBx: Protectionism of any sort, and in whatever guise or disguise, is the opposite of progressive and is always poisonous to the efforts of ordinary people to become more prosperous. (The fact that ordinary people are often oblivious to this reality does nothing to make this reality less real.)
