… is from page 185 of Edwin Cannan’s 1902 address to the British Association (Section F) – an address titled “The Practical Utility of Economic Science” – as this address is reprinted in the 1912 collection of some of Cannan’s essays, The Economic Outlook (E. Cannan, ed.):
The people who are most anxious to obstruct changes in the channels of trade which are coming about of themselves because they are profitable, are often extremely anxious to promote changes which will not come about of themselves because they are not profitable.
DBx: Yep.
It’s common, for example, for economic nationalists, with one breath, to decry the need for workers to adjust to the changes that necessarily accompany economic growth, and then with the next breath advocate government-imposed schemes to attempt to re-engineer the economy in order to make it more pleasing to the intellectual conceits of economic nationalists. The implicit – indeed, unconscious – assumption is that the need to adjust to changes brought on by market forces is excessively burdensome and not worthwhile, while the need to adjust to changes brought on by government intervention are easy and worthwhile. No one, to my knowledge, has ever bothered to explain why this difference might prevail in reality.
