I've just written a review of Deirdre McCloskey's new book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the World for the New Statesman – I'll post the link when it's published. I enjoyed the book, the second of a planned six on the Bourgeois Era. Suffice it to say for now that McCloskey (a) is not as wholly dismissive of economics as the subtitle suggests and (b) would have us rediscover the bourgeois virtues and mindset. Hear, hear.

She did remind me in an early chapter of the nice passage in Frederic Bastiat's Economic Sophisms, the section on  A Negative Railroad, a clever spoof of protectionism. The fact that Bastiat is so beloved of every ultra-free marketeer shouldn't put people with other views off reading him; he's a clear and even witty writer with some very sensible views especially when read in the context of the mercantilism of his own times.

The city of Bordeaux demanded the planned Paris-Madrid line break there to 'create jobs' for porters and hoteliers. Bastiat made the reductio ad absurdum argument that every village along the line should have its own Gare du Nord and Gare du Sud, generating income from the many breaks in the line so created.

“But if Bordeaux has a right to profit from a break in the tracks, and
if this profit is consistent with the public interest, then Angoulême,
Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, and, in fact, all the intermediate points,
including Ruffec, Châtellerault, etc., etc., ought also to demand breaks
in the tracks, on the ground of the general interest—in the interest,
that is, of domestic industry—for the more there are of these breaks in
the line, the greater will be the amount paid for storage, porters, and
cartage at every point along the way. By this means, we shall end by
having a railroad composed of a whole series of breaks in the tracks,
i.e., a negative railroad.

Whatever the protectionists may say, it is no less certain that the
basic principle of restriction is the same as the basic principle of
breaks in the tracks: the sacrifice of the consumer to the producer, of
the end to the means.”