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… is from page 206 of the 1992 collection of some of William Graham Sumner’s best essays, On Liberty, Society, and Politics [2] (Roger C. Bannister, ed.); specifically, this quotation is from Sumner’s famous 1883 essay, “The Forgotten Man [3]“:
Civil liberty is the status of the man who is guaranteed by law and civil institutions the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare.
DBx: Protectionists are among the enemies of civil liberty. Protectionists insist that a subset of existing domestic producers have the right to use state power to obstruct each fellow-citizen’s choice of how he or she spends his or her own money. In the mind of the protectionist, fellow citizens earn income not only for the purpose of improving their and their families’ well-being as each judges best, but also – and perhaps chiefly – for the purpose of enriching a subset of existing producers who seek, not profit earned by offering consumers good deals but, instead, rents confiscated through special privileges enforced ultimately with threats of violence.
Protectionism is armed robbery camouflaged as economic “policy.”