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“Whenever someone starts talking about 'fair competition' or indeed, about 'fairness' in general, it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“Your greatest weapon is your MIND! Lock and load it with the greatest ammunition; EDUCATION. And protect it with your best defense; GOD.”
― Marck E. Estemil, It Is Time

“Modern Western democracies no longer engage in such despotic assaults on freedom, Instead, they deprive people of liberty indirectly, by relieving them of responsibility for their own (allegedly self-injurious) actions and calling the intervention "treatment.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted

“[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't stick to trade…they colonize environmental labor, and consumer issues of grave concern (in terms of health safety, and livelihoods too) to many, many hundreds of millions of people - and they do that by subordinating consumer, environmental, and labor issues to the imperatives and the supremacy of international commerce.

That is exactly the reverse of how democratic societies have progressed, because over the decades they've progressed by subordinating the profiteering priorities of companies to, say, higher environmental health standards; abolition of child labor; the right of workers to have fair worker standards…and it's this subordination of these three major categories that affect people's lives, labor, environment, the consumer, to the supremacy and domination of trade; where instead of trade getting on its knees and showing that it doesn't harm consumers - it doesn't deprive the important pharmaceuticals because of drug company monopolies, it doesn't damage the air and water and soil and food (environmentally), and it doesn't lacerate the rights of workers - no, it's just the opposite: it's workers and consumers and environments that have to kneel before this giant pedestal of commercial trade and prove that they are not, in a whole variety of ways, impeding international commerce…so this is the road to dictatorial devolution of democratic societies: because these trade agreements have the force of law, they've got enforcement teeth, and they bypass national courts, national regulatory agencies, in ways that really reflect a massive, silent, mega-corporate coup d'etat…that was pulled off in the mid-1990's.”
― Ralph Nader

“Reshoring, backshoring, and onshoring are now replacing offshoring and outsourcing.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Where there is commerce there is peace.”
― Jeffrey Tucker

“Protectionism, such as what U.S. president Donald Trump was attempting, amounts in effect under these circumstances (that is, in the absence of any significant expansion of state expenditure financed either by a fiscal deficit or by taxes on capitalists) to an export of unemployment to other countries. It can work only if the other countries do not retaliate.

If they do, then it gives rise to a competitive “beggar-thy-neighborâ€� policy that only worsens the crisis by creating further uncertainties and reducing investments further.”
― Utsa Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present

“Economic crises breed war.”
― Alex Callinicos, Revolutionary Road to Socialism

“But the cruelest of our revenue laws, I will venture to affirm, are mild and gentle, in comparison to some of those which the clamour of our merchants and manufacturers has extorted from the legislature, for the support of their own absurd and oppressive monopolies. Like the laws of Draco, these laws may be said to be all written in blood.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“As clear as it is important, the death of Detroit is still mostly ignored. Generally, the slow destruction of a major city would get a fair amount of attention, but the lack of coverage is hardly surprising. After all, the “bad guysâ€� aren’t the popular ones. In most circles, condemning taxation, regulation, unionization, welfarism and protectionism is unfashionable. It’s necessary to check political correctness at the door and appreciate that the case of Detroit isn’t an isolated tragedy. What happened in Detroit could be coming to a city near you.”
― Daniel Greenup, The Death of Detroit

“Pursuing protectionism is just like locking one's self in a dark room: Wind and rain might be kept outside but so are light and air.”
― Xi Jinping

“The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as 'protectionism' â€� and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers. And the idea that local needs should be met first and only surpluses exported does not imply any prejudice against charity toward people in other places or trade with them. The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. And the principle of subsistence is in fact the best guarantee of giveable or marketable surpluses. This kind of protection is not 'isolationism.”
― Wendell Berry

“The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.”
― Gideon Haigh

“Wherever autocratic power vanished at an early date—as in the Netherlands and later in England—and the protective interest receded into the background, they swiftly discovered that trade must be free—“free to the nethermost recesses of hell.”
― Joseph Alois Schumpeter

“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes, and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within two hundred years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.”
― Ulysses S. Grant

“But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals - protectionism on one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Yet these doctrines are both characterised, not only or chiefly by their infringing the general presumption in favour of laissez-faire, but by mere logical fallacy. Both are examples of poor thinking, of inability to analyse a process and follow it out to its conclusion. The arguments against them, though reinforced by the principle of laissez-faire, do not strictly require it. Of the two, protectionism is at least plausible, and the forces making for its popularity are nothing to wonder at. But Marxian socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion - how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men and, through them, the events of history. At any rate, the obvious scientific deficiencies of these two schools greatly contributed to the prestige and authority of nineteenth-century laissez-faire.”
― John Maynard Keynes, End of Laissez Faire

“Without a family, Ma Lin devoted himself to his work. He continued to shun ideology but occasionally caught himself wondering about the WHY of things he did in his work. Often he felt, and justifiably so, that something he had done had benefited the state or preserved someone's life or safety. Other times, like now, in this room with an old woman who knew nothing important and had curled up to die, he felt old and tired and worn out.”
― David Ball, China Run