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… is from Deirdre McCloskey’s review, in the September 8th edition of the Wall Street Journal [2], of Jesse Norman’s Adam Smith: Father of Economics [3]:
Yet few of us, and fewer in the White House nowadays, have heard, or grasped, Smith’s sneer that “nothing . . . can be more absurd than the whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”
DBx: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Nothing, indeed, can be more absurd – or more ridiculous, more misleading, and more prone to fuel demagoguery – than the entire doctrine of the so-called ‘balance of trade.’