Maxim-izing Utility

Lucrum sine damno alterius fieri non potest. -- Publilius Syrus  

Le profit de l'un est dommage de l'autre. -- Michel de Montaigne  

Whatsoever is somewhere gotten is somewhere lost. -- Francis Bacon 

For some two hundred years both economic theorists and practical men did not doubt that there is a peculiar advantage to a country in a favourable balance of trade, and grave danger in an unfavourable balance, particularly if it results in an efflux of the precious metals. But for the past one hundred years there has been a remarkable divergence of opinion. The majority of statesmen and practical men in most countries, and nearly half of them even in great Britain, the home of the opposite view, have remained faithful to the ancient doctrine; whereas almost all economic theorists have held that anxiety concerning such matters is absolutely groundless except on a very short view, since the mechanism of foreign trade is self-adjusting and attempts to interfere with it are not only futile, but greatly impoverish those who practice them because they forfeit the advantages of the international division of labour. […] Nevertheless, as a contribution to statecraft, which is concerned with the economic system as a whole and with securing the optimum employment of the system’s entire resources, the methods of the early pioneers of economic thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have attained to fragments of practical wisdom which the unrealistic abstractions of Ricardo first forgot and then obliterated. -- John Maynard Keynes

Trade will find its own level. -- Dorning Rasbotham

The price of corn, like water, will find its own level. -- Benjamin Franklin

Dexar hazer a la naturaleza allí, y aquí a la moralidad. -- Baltasar Gracian

Patience is a remedy for every sorrow. -- Publilius Syrus