Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 113-114 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society (footnote deleted):

What “protection,” for example, do tariffs on steel, or for that matter on anything else, give to such industries as the railroads, the light, power, telephone, and telegraph companies, the building trades, automobile manufacturers, newspapers, hotels, bakeries, milk producers and distributors, streetcars, busses, ferries, lake and river steamboats, the freight business, or the service industries, such as garages and filling stations? The anatomy of the [Smoot-Hawley] tariff bill itself contains conclusive proof that certain producer interests, not American producers as a whole, are responsible for the fact that commerce is being regulated in the particular way that the law regulates it. The Marxian assumption that Congress legislated for “the consolidated affairs” of “the bourgeois class” is as misleading as the assumption of the defenders of the tariff that it legislated for the American people as a whole.