… is from page 224 of my late, great teacher Fritz Machlup’s 1977 book, A History of Thought on Economic Integration; Machlup – pictured here – in this passage is summarizing his assessment of Friedrich List’s case for protectionism; the second bracketed comment is Machlup’s own:
[List’s] arguments, however, lacked the necessary analytical support. His assertion that free competition between two nations can be mutually beneficial only if both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development is completely unfounded. [What about several parts of a nation with different degrees of industrialisation?]