… is from page 339 of A. James Meigs’s excellent Fall 1988 Cato Journal paper, “Dollars and Deficits: Substituting False for Real Problems,” as this paper appears as chapter 14 of Dollars, Deficits, & Trade (James A. Dorn and William A. Niskanen, eds., 1989):
[T]he political system now permits an industry to extract costs of protection from the whole population without weighing the costs and benefits to everybody else. This is where the problems of controlling spending and resisting protectionism are similar.
DBx: In theory, government protects everyone from both predation and free-riding. In practice, government often is a predator for its cronies and it frequently arranges for free-riding.
