Thorold Rogers looks at how Governments have tried to make trade ‘fair’, and concludes that they would have been better ensuring it was free.
To Sir Francis Bacon, writing in 1625, it was self-evident that one man’s gain is always another man’s loss — that if Paul is doing well Peter must be doing correspondingly badly. He wanted Governments to step in and even things up, but Victorian economist Thorold Rogers warned that Bacon had fallen prey to a delusion which has nursed wars and corruption, but brought no justice.