Quotation of the Day…

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… is from chapter 1 of William Graham Sumner’s splendid 1885 book, Protectionism: the -ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth; this quotation is especially important in light of Treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s recent boast that Donald Trump sees the global economy “as inter-linkages that can be reordered” – by Trump & Co.’s top-down human scheming, of course – “to advance the interest of the American people”:

Here we have a complete illustration of one mode of looking at human society, or at a state. Such society is, on this view, an artificial or mechanical product. It is an object to be molded, made, produced by contrivance. Like every product which is brought out by working up to an ideal instead of working out from antecedent truth and fact, the product here is hap hazard, grotesque, false. Like every other product which is brought out by working on lines fixed by à priori assumptions, it is a satire on human foresight and on what we call common sense. Such a state is like a house of cards, built up anxiously one upon another, ready to fall at a breath, to be credited at most with naive hope and silly confidence; or, it is like the long and tedious contrivance of a mischievous school-boy, for an end which has been entirely mis-appreciated and was thought desirable when it should have been thought a folly; or, it is like the museum of an alchemist, filled with specimens of his failures, monuments of mistaken industry and testimony of an erroneous method; or, it is like the clumsy product of an untrained inventor, who, instead of asking “what means have I, and to what will they serve?” asks: “what do I wish that I could accomplish?” and seeks to win steps by putting in more levers and cogs, increasing friction and putting the solution ever further off.