… is from page 312 of John Witherspoon’s 1778 open letter to George Washington titled “On the Proposed Market in General Washington’s Camp,” as this letter appears in full in my Mercatus Center colleague Erik Matson’s splendid new paper “The Recurrent Evils of Price Controls: John Witherspoon’s 1778 Letter to George Washington“:
Now, Sir, I have read and considered your plan, the chief part of which is settling the prices of a variety of articles, which it is expected will be exposed to sale. Fixing the price of commodities, has been attempted by law in several states among us, and it has increased the evil it was meant to remedy, as the same practice ever has done since the beginning of the world.
DBx: As Erik explains, Witherspoon (1723-1794) for some reason never published the letter during his lifetime; it was found in his papers and first published in 1803.
