… is from page 19 of W. Duncan Reekie’s 1988 Managerial and Decision Economics paper titled “Consumers’ Sovereignty Revisited“; by “custom thought” – a term coined by W.H. Hutt – Reekie refers to that part of the human psyche that fears change:
The essence of a competitive economy is entrepreneurial alertness to and search for new and better ways of doing things – in short, change. Cartelization, however damaging to the community at large, removes or appears to remove the discordant change from cartel participants. Custom thought can thus be readily harnessed to oppose any threatened convulsion.
DBx: Protectionism is the effort to protect particular individuals, in their roles as producers, from having to adjust to changes in the preferences of their fellow citizens. Protectionism, thus, is a means of compelling the masses to pay for the comfort of the few.
