Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on April 22, 2018
… is from David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of the Balance of Trade” (here from pages 309-310 of the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):
But there still prevails, even in nations well acquainted with commerce, a strong jealousy with regard to the balance of trade, and a fear, that all their gold and silver may be leaving them. This seems to me, almost in every case, a groundless apprehension; and I should as soon dread, that all our springs and rivers should be exhausted, as that money should abandon a kingdom where there are people and industry. Let us carefully preserve these latter advantages; and we need never be apprehensive of losing the former.
DBx: It is truly a shame that “this whole doctrine of the balance of trade” – a doctrine unsalvageably absurd – was not long ago cast where it belongs, namely, into the towering trash heap of the many cockamamie notions that people, throughout history, once clung to.
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