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… is from page 48 of John Stuart Mill’s 1825 essay “The Corn Laws,” as this essay is reprinted in Essays on Economics and Society Part I [2], which is volume IV of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006):
It will scarcely, we imagine, be any longer deemed necessary to demonstrate the beneficial tendency of free trade in general, or to prove that it is for the interest of a nation to purchase its commodities where they are cheap, and not where they are dear. Self-evident as this proposition may appear, it is one of the most modern of all modern discoveries, and has had to make its way against all the resistance which strong interests and still stronger prejudices could oppose to it.
DBx: Sadly, the combination of strong interests and still stronger prejudices – a noxious brew of rent-seeking, venal office-grabbing, economic nationalism, and economic ignorance – continues to poison society by nourishing protectionism.
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