… is from pages 284-285 of Jacob Viner‘s October 1948 World Politics article, “Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” as this article is reprinted in the 1958 collection of selected articles by Viner titled The Long View and the Short:
What was apparently a phase of scholastic economics, that what is one man’s gain is necessarily another man’s loss, was taken over by the mercantilists and applied to countries as a whole. They incorporated this with their tendency to identify wealth with money, and with their doctrine that, as far as money was concerned, what mattered was not the absolute quantity but the relative quantity as compared with other countries.
DBx: Trump and his trade advisors all cling tightly to this medieval slab of stupidity. But so, too, do the likes of Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and pundits, professors, and politicians too numerous to mention in the ranks of the ludicrously labeled “Progressives.”
