Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 201 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s May 1993 article in Reader’s Digest, “What Trade Laws Cost You”:

By maintaining trade barriers or erecting new ones in “retaliation,” we abet an absurd misconception. As Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute notes: “People often view world trade as if it were the Olympics and only one nation could come in first in any contest.” But we are not talking contest; we are talking market. When someone buys a Buick made in Oklahoma rather than a Chevrolet made in Ohio, we don’t read news headlines about Oklahoma “beating” Ohio and ruining that states’s “balance of trade.” The bottom line in any trade situation should be how satisfied the individuals involved in the transactions are – whether it’s the American driver of the German car or the German businessman who invests the profits from that car in an American business.

DBx: Yes.

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I can find no on-line version of this article by Walter.