The Public Interest

The new mercantilism

Charles Wolf, Jr.

Summer 1994

IN ONE OF HIS many insightful observations, John Maynard Keynes noted that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” He noted further that the power of ideas can be immense “both when they are right and when they are wrong,” concluding that “it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

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