Quotation of the Day…

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… is from chapter 3 of William Graham Sumner’s great 1885 book, Protectionism: the -ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth (footnotes deleted):

The protectionists make much of their pretended “nationalism,” and they try to reason out some kind of relationship between the scope of economic forces and the boundaries of existing nations. The argumentation is fatally broken at its first step. They do not show what they might show, viz., that the scope of economic forces on any given stage of the arts, does form economic units. An English county was such a unit a century ago. I doubt if any thing less than the whole earth could be considered so to-day, when the wool of Australia, the hides of South America, the cotton of Alabama, the wheat of Manitoba and the meat of Texas meet the laborers in Manchester and Sheffield, and would meet the laborers in Lowell and Paterson, if the barriers were out of the way. But what the national protectionist would need to show would be that the economic unit coincides with the political unit. He would have to affirm that Maine and Texas are in one economic unit, but that Maine and New Brunswick are not; or that Massachusetts and Minnesota are in one economic unit, but that Massachusetts and Manitoba are not. Every existing state is a product of historic accidents. Mr. Jefferson set out to buy the city of New Orleans. He awoke one morning to find that he had bought the western half of the Mississippi valley. Since that turned out so the protectionists think that Missouri and Illinois prosper by trading in perfect freedom.

If it had not turned out so, it would have been very mischievous for them to trade in perfect freedom. Nova Scotia did not join the revolt of our thirteen colonies. Hence it is thought ruinous to let coal and potatoes come in freely from Nova Scotia. If she had revolted with us, it would have been for the benefit of every body in this union to trade with her as freely as we now trade with Maine. We tried to conquer Canada in 1812–13 and failed Consequently the Canadians now put taxes on our coal and petroleum and wheat, and we put taxes on their lumber, which our coal and petroleum industries need. We did annex Texas, at the cost of war, in 1845. Consequently we trade with Texas now under absolute freedom, but, if we trade with Mexico, it must be only very carefully and under stringent limitations. Is this wisdom, or is it all pure folly and wrong headedness, by which men who boast of their intelligence throw away their own chances?