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… upon noticing that the more scarce is a good or service the higher is the price it fetches, concludes that the wealth of the nation grows the greater is the scarcity of goods and services in the nation.
The protectionist, seeing that those people who supply unusually scarce goods and services earn unusually high incomes, fails to understand that those incomes are earned only because, and only insofar as, those suppliers help to alleviate the scarcity. The protectionist simply cannot grasp the reality that wealth is not the scarcity itself but, instead, the alleviation of the scarcity.