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… is from David Hume’s 1742 essay “Of the Middle Station of Life [2]” (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 [3]) [3]:
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 [4] and others who endorse rule-by-‘experts’ would be wise to ponder this question. Such pondering, if done wisely, leads to his 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.’