Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on October 19, 2018
… is from chapter 1 of William Graham Sumner’s 1885 book, Protectionism: the -ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth (footnote omitted):
Protectionism is not a theory in the correct sense of the term, but it comes under some of the popular and incorrect uses of the word. It is purely dogmatic and à priori. It is desired to attain a certain object – wealth and national prosperity. Protective taxes are proposed as a means. It must be assumed that there is some connection between protective taxes and national prosperity, some relation of cause and effect, some sequence of expended energy and realized product, between protective taxes and national wealth. If then by theory we mean a speculative conjecture as to occult relations which have not been and can not be traced in experience, protection would be a capital example. Another and parallel example was furnished by astrology, which assumed a causal relation between the movements of the planets and the fate of men, and built up quite an art of soothsaying on this assumption. Another example, paralleling protectionism in another feature, was alchemy, which, accepting as unquestionable the notion that we want to transmute lead into gold if we can, assumed that there was a philosopher’s stone, and set to work to find it through centuries of repetition of the method of “trial and failure.”
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