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… is from page 296 of Jacob Viner [2]’s October 1948 World Politics article, “Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries [3],” as this article is reprinted in the 1958 collection of selected articles by Viner titled The Long View and the Short [4]; 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.