… is from page 296 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; here Viner is quoting Sir Francis Bacon who himself was reporting the remarks of an unnamed member of Parliament during the reign of James I:
[Y]et, nevertheless, it was a thing too familiar with the merchant, to make the case of his particular profit, the public case of the kingdom.
DBx: Among the practically uncountable number of errors that infect mercantilist dogma is indeed the false notion that the prosperity of the people of a country rises and falls only as the profits of a handful of existing domestic producers – those domestic producers that, for whatever reason, are politically in the limelight – rise and fall.
Mercantilism specifically, and protectionism generally, is overwhelmingly an unscrupulous effort to persuade the state to commandeer consumers and taxpayers to do the bidding of a relatively small handful of existing domestic producers.
