It is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another … - John Atkinson Hobson

Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.

The imputation of political significance to... statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce.

Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking.