… is from David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of the Middle Station of Life” (here from page 550 of the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of some of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene F. Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):
If no Man were allow’d to write Verses, but who was, before-hand, nam’d to be laureat, cou’d we expect a Poet in ten thousand Years?
DBx: Industrial policyists and others who endorse rule-by-‘experts’ would be wise to ponder this question. Such pondering, if done wisely, leads to this conclusion: Government’s use of tariffs and subsidies to pick ‘winners’ results inevitably in government picking and protecting losers – this despite the fact that, because of the absence of competition, the losers might sometimes appear to be ‘winners.’
