In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.^[1]

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

The same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others. Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight. For that reason I shall investigate the consequences of several economic phenomena, contrasting those that are seen with those that are not seen.

The Broken Window

Have you ever been witness to the fury of that solid citizen, James Goodfellow,^[2] when his incorrigible son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at this spectacle, certainly you must also have observed that the onlookers, even if there are as many as thirty of them, seem with one accord to offer the unfortunate owner the selfsame consolation: “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody some good. Such accidents keep industry going. Everybody has to make a living. What would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke a window?”

Now, this formula of condolence contains a whole theory that it is a good idea for us to expose, flagrante delicto, in this very simple case, since it is exactly the same as that which, unfortunately, underlies most of our economic institutions.

Suppose that it will cost six francs to repair the damage. If you mean that the accident gives six francs’ worth of encouragement to the aforesaid industry, I agree. I do not contest it in any way; your reasoning is correct. The glazier will come, do his job, receive six francs, congratulate himself, and bless in his heart the careless child. That is what is seen.

But if, by way of deduction, you conclude, as happens only too often, that it is good to break windows, that it helps to circulate money, that it results in encouraging industry in general, I am obliged to cry out: That will never do! Your theory stops at what is seen. It does not take account of what is not seen.

It is not seen that, since our citizen has spent six francs for one thing, he will not be able to spend them for another. It is not seen that if he had not had a windowpane to replace, he would have replaced, for example, his worn-out shoes or added another book to his library. In brief, he would have put his six francs to some use or other for which he will not now have them.

Let us next consider industry in general. The window having been broken, the glass industry gets six francs’ worth of encouragement; that is what is seen.

If the window had not been broken, the shoe industry (or some other) would have received six francs’ worth of encouragement; that is what is not seen.

And if we were to take into consideration what is not seen, because it is a negative factor, as well as what is seen, because it is a positive factor, we should understand that there is no benefit to industry in general or to national employment as a whole, whether windows are broken or not broken.

Now let us consider James Goodfellow.

On the first hypothesis, that of the broken window, he spends six francs and has, neither more nor less than before, the enjoyment of one window.

On the second, that in which the accident did not happen, he would have spent six francs for new shoes and would have had the enjoyment of a pair of shoes as well as of a window.

Now, if James Goodfellow is part of society, we must conclude that society, considering its labors and its enjoyments, has lost the value of the broken window.

From which, by generalizing, we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of objects unnecessarily destroyed,” and at this aphorism, which will make the hair of the protectionists stand on end: “To break, to destroy, to dissipate is not to encourage national employment,” or more briefly: “Destruction is not profitable.”

What will the Moniteur industriel^[3] say to this, or the disciples of the estimable M. de Saint-Chamans,^[4] who has calculated with such precision what industry would gain from the burning of Paris, because of the houses that would have to be rebuilt?

I am sorry to upset his ingenious calculations, especially since their spirit has passed into our legislation. But I beg him to begin them again, entering what is not seen in the ledger beside what is seen.

The reader must apply himself to observe that there are not only two people, but three, in the little drama that I have presented. The one, James Goodfellow, represents the consumer, reduced by destruction to one enjoyment instead of two. The other, under the figure of the glazier, shows us the producer whose industry the accident encourages. The third is the shoemaker (or any other manufacturer) whose industry is correspondingly discouraged by the same cause. It is this third person who is always in the shadow, and who, personifying what is not seen, is an essential element of the problem. It is he who makes us understand how absurd it is to see a profit in destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is equally absurd to see a profit in trade restriction, which is, after all, nothing more nor less than partial destruction. So, if you get to the bottom of all the arguments advanced in favor of restrictionist measures, you will find only a paraphrase of that common cliché: “What would become of the glaziers if no one ever broke any windows?”

Notes

1. This pamphlet, published in July 1850, is the last that Bastiat wrote. It had been promised to the public for more than a year. Its publication had been delayed because the author had lost the manuscript when he moved his household from the rue de Choiseul to the rue d’Alger. After a long and fruitless search, he decided to rewrite his work entirely, and chose as the principal basis of his demonstrations some speeches recently delivered in the National Assembly. When this task was finished, he reproached himself with having been too serious, threw the second manuscript into the fire, and wrote the one which we reprint.—Editor.
2. In French, Jacques Bonhomme, used like “John Bull” in English to represent the practical, responsible, unassuming average man.—Translator.
3. Newspaper of the Committee for the Defense of Domestic Industry, a protectionist organization.—Translator.
4. Auguste, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans (1777-1861), Deputy and Councillor of State under the Restoration, protectionist and upholder of the balance of trade. His celebrated stand on the “obstacle” here quoted by Bastiat comes from his Nouvel essai sur la richesse des nations, 1824. This work was later (1852) incorporated in his Traité d’économie politique.—Translator.

Among all the circumstances that have some part in giving to a people its distinctive features, its moral tone, its character, its habits, laws, and peculiar spirit, the one that overshadows all others, because it includes virtually all of them, is its manner of providing its means of existence. We owe this observation to Charles Comte,^[1] and it is surprising that it has not had greater influence on the social and political sciences.

In fact, this circumstance affects the human race in two equally powerful ways: by being a constant concern, and by being the concern of everyone. Earning a living, supporting oneself, improving one’s condition, raising a family–these are not matters of taste, opinion, or choice, involving one time or one locality only; these are the daily, lifelong, inescapable preoccupations of all men at all times and in all places.

Everywhere the major part of men’s physical, intellectual, and moral forces is devoted directly or indirectly to creating and replenishing their means of subsistence. The hunter, the fisherman, the sheep raiser, the farmer, the manufacturer, the businessman, the laborer, the artisan, the capitalist, all think, first of all, in terms of keeping soul and body together (however prosaic this admission may be) and, secondly, of living better and better, if possible. That this is so is proved by the fact that it is for no other reason that they are hunters, manufacturers, farmers, etc. Similarly, the civil servant, the soldier, the magistrate enter upon these careers only in order to ensure the satisfaction of their wants. Nor should we hold it against the man who follows a vocation calling for disinterestedness and self-sacrifice if he, too, invokes the proverb: To the priest the altar is a livelihood; for before he became a priest, he was a man. And if at this very moment such an individual is writing a book against the vulgarity of this observation of mine, or rather against the vulgarity of the human condition, the sale of his book will argue against his own thesis.

God forbid that I should deny the existence of self-sacrifice. But it will be admitted that examples of it are exceptional, and this is what makes them meritorious and worthy of our admiration. For, if we consider mankind as a whole, unless we have made a pact with the demon of sentimentality, we must admit that disinterested acts cannot be compared, numerically speaking, with those that are dictated by the hard necessities of our nature. And it is because these acts, which make up the sum total of our labors, occupy so large a part of the lives of each one of us, that they cannot fail to influence greatly the phenomena of our national life.

Saint-Marc Girardin and Rousseau

M. Saint-Marc Girardin^[2] says somewhere that he came to realize that political forms are relatively unimportant compared with the great general laws that are imposed upon people by their wants and by the labor they do. “Do you desire to know what any nation really is?” he asked. “Ask not how it is governed, but what it does for a living.”

As a general judgment this is correct. But the author soon gives it a false sense by turning it into a system. The importance of political forms has been exaggerated; so what does he do? He reduces it to nothing, he denies it completely, or he recognizes its existence only to laugh at it. Political forms, he says, interest us only on election day or during the hour we set aside for reading the newspaper. Monarchy or republic, aristocracy or democracy, what difference does it make? And so we must look at the conclusion he reaches. Maintaining that young nations resemble one another, regardless of their political organization, he likens the United States to ancient Egypt, because both have carried out enterprises of gigantic proportions. But I protest. When the Americans clear vast tracts of land, dig canals, build railroads, they do it all for themselves, because they are a democracy and are their own masters [The Egyptians erected temples, pyramids, obelisks, and palaces for their kings and their priests, because they were slaves! And this is only a slight difference, a mere matter of form, hardly worth noticing, or, if we do notice it, deserving only to be laughed at! Oh, the deadly contagion of the veneration for things classic! How it corrupts its superstitious devotees!

Soon after, M. Saint-Marc Girardin, still pursuing the same point, that the principal occupations of a people determine its national character, goes on to say: In the past, nations concerned themselves with war and religion; today, their chief preoccupation is with commerce and industry. For this reason the generations that preceded us had a warlike and religious character.

Rousseau had earlier declared that concern with one's mere existence was the dominant interest of only a few nations, and those of a most unimaginative kind; that other nations, more worthy of the name, had devoted themselves to nobler pursuits.

Were not M. Saint-Marc Girardin and Rousseau perhaps the victims of one of the illusions of history? May they not have mistaken the amusements and the diversions, that is, the devices and instruments of despotism, in which some of the citizens indulged, for the occupations of the entire nation? And may not this illusion be due to the fact that historians are always talking about the class that does not work and never about the classes that do, so that eventually we come to identify the entire nation with the leisure class?

Cultivating Force and Fraud

I cannot help thinking that among the Greeks, as among the Romans and in the Middle Ages, men were just as they are today, that is, subject to wants so strong, so recurrent, that it was necessary to provide for them on pain of death. Therefore, I cannot help concluding, that then, as now, these wants were the chief and most absorbing preoccupation of the great majority of the human race.

What does appear certain is that a very small number of men managed to live without working, supported by the labor of the oppressed masses. This small leisured group made their slaves construct sumptuous palaces, vast castles, or somber fortresses. They loved to surround themselves with all the sensuous pleasures of life and with all the monuments of art. They delighted in discoursing on philosophy and cosmogony; and, above all, they carefully cultivated the two sciences to which they owed their supremacy and their enjoyments: the science of force and the science of fraud.

For beneath this aristocracy were the countless multitudes occupied in creating, for themselves, the means of sustaining life and, for their oppressors, the means of surfeiting them with pleasures. Since the historians never make the slightest mention of these multitudes, we forget their existence; they do not count for us at all. We have eyes only for the aristocracy. It is this class that we call ancient society or feudal society. We imagine that such societies were self-sustaining, that they never had recourse to anything so mundane as commerce, industry, or labor; we admire their unselfishness, their generosity, their love of the arts, their spiritual qualities, their disdain for servile occupations, their lofty thoughts and sentiments; we declare, with a certain quaver in the voice, that at one time the nations cared only for glory, at another only for the arts, at another only for philosophy, at another only for religion, at another only for virtue; we very sincerely weep over our own sorry state; we speak of our age with sarcasm because, unable to rise to the sublime heights attained by such paragons, we are reduced to according to labor and to all the prosaic virtues associated with it so important a place in our modern life.

Let us console ourselves with the thought that it played a no less important role in ancient life. The only difference was that the labor that a few men had managed to escape fell crushingly on the oppressed masses, to the great detriment of justice, liberty, property, wealth, equality, and progress; and this is the first of the disturbing factors to which I must call the reader's attention.

Securing the Means of Existence

The ways by which men provide their means of existence cannot fail to exert a great influence on their physical, moral, intellectual, economic, and political condition.

If we could observe a number of primitive tribes, one of which had devoted itself exclusively to hunting, another to fishing, a third to agriculture, and a fourth to navigation, who could doubt that these tribes would present considerable differences in their ideas, opinions, habits, customs, manners, laws, and religion? No doubt we should find human nature basically the same everywhere. Therefore, their laws, habits, and religions would have many points in common, which, I believe, could well be called the general laws of human society.

However, in our great modern societies all or nearly all the processes of production—fishing, agriculture, industry, commerce, the sciences, and the arts—are at work simultaneously, although in varying proportions in different countries. For this reason the differences among nations are not and cannot be as great as they would be if each nation devoted itself exclusively to one occupation.

But if the nature of a people's occupations greatly influences its morality, it is also true that its desires, its tastes, and its morality exert in their turn a great influence on the nature of its occupations, or at least on their relative importance. I shall not add anything more to this observation, which has already been presented elsewhere in this work, and thus I reach the main subject of this chapter.

A man (and the same may be said of a people) can secure the means of existence in two ways: by creating them or by stealing them.

Each of these two main means of procurement includes a variety of procedures.

We can create means of existence by hunting, fishing, farming, etc.

We can steal them by bad faith, violence, force, fraud, war, etc.

If, remaining within the limits of either one of these two main categories, we observe that the predominance of one or another of the procedures appropriate to it is sufficient to give rise to considerable differences among the nations, how much greater must not this difference be between a people that lives by producing and a people that lives by plundering!

For there is not one of our faculties, of whatever order, that is not called into use by our need to provide for our existence; and what can we conceive of that is more likely to modify the social condition of a nation than that which modifies all the human faculties?

This consideration, in spite of its importance, has received so little attention that I must pause to comment on it for a moment.

In order for man to obtain a satisfaction, he must have performed a certain amount of labor; hence, it follows that plunder, in all its varieties, far from excluding the act of production, presupposes it.

And this thought, it seems to me, is such as to moderate somewhat the infatuation of the historians, the poets, and the novelists for those heroic ages past when, according to them, what they call industrialism did not yet dominate society. In those days, as in our own, people had to live; then, as now, labor performed its hard task. But some nations, some classes, some individuals had succeeded in loading off onto other nations, other classes, other individuals, their portion of the general toil and drudgery.

Production or Plunder

The characteristic feature of production is, so to speak, to create out of nothing the satisfactions that sustain and beautify life, so that an individual or a people is enabled to multiply these satisfactions indefinitely without inflicting privation of any kind on other men or other peoples; quite the contrary: for careful study of the economic mechanism of a free society has shown us that the success of one man in his work improves the chances of success for others in their work.

The characteristic feature of plunder is its inability to provide any satisfaction without a corresponding privation, for it does not create; it diverts to its own ends what has already been created by the labor of others. It entails the absolute loss of all the effort it itself costs the two parties concerned. Far from adding to the enjoyments of mankind, it decreases them, and, moreover, it allots them to those who have not deserved them.

In order to produce, we must direct all our faculties toward the conquest of Nature; for it is Nature that must be fought, mastered, and subjugated. That is why iron beaten into a plowshare is the emblem of production.

In order to plunder, we must direct all our faculties toward the conquest of men; for they are the ones we must fight, kill, or enslave. That is why iron beaten into a sword is the emblem of plunder.

As great as is the difference between the plowshare that feeds and the sword that kills, so great must be the difference between a nation of workers and a nation of plunderers. It is not possible for there to be any common ground between these two. They cannot have the same ideas, the same standards, the same tastes, the same character, the same customs, the same laws, the same morality, or the same religion.

And surely one of the saddest sights that can present itself to anyone who loves mankind is that of a productive age bending all its efforts to infect itself—by way of education—with the thoughts, the sentiments, the errors, the prejudices, and the vices of a nation of plunderers. Our age is often accused of a lack of consistency, of a failure to show any correlation between the ideals it professes and the way of life it pursues. The criticism is just, and I believe that I have here indicated the principal reason why this situation prevails.

Plunder by War

Plunder by way of war, that is, rudimentary plunder, simple and undisguised, has its roots in the human heart, in man's nature, in the universal motive force that actuates the social world—his attraction toward satisfactions and his aversion to pain; in a word, in that motivating force that we all have within us: self-interest.

And I am not distressed at now being the one to indict self-interest. Until now the reader may well have believed that my veneration of this principle amounted to idolatry, that I attributed to it only happy consequences for humanity, perhaps that I even placed it above altruism, devotion, self-sacrifice. No, I have not passed any judgment on it; I have merely noted that it exists and that it is all-powerful. I should poorly appreciate its all-powerful nature and I should be guilty of contradicting myself in calling self-interest the universal motive force of mankind, if I did not now point it out as a source of discord, just as I previously indicated that it was the source of the laws that govern the harmony of the social order.

Man, as we have said, strives irresistibly to assure his own preservation, to improve his lot, and to attain, or at least to come as near as possible to attaining, happiness as he conceives it. For the same reason he shuns pain and suffering.

Now, labor, the operation that he must perform upon Nature in order to produce anything, is itself pain and drudgery. For this reason he is averse to labor and resigns himself to it only when it is the means of avoiding an even greater evil. Taking the philosophical point of view, there are those who say that labor is a boon. They are right if we consider its results. Relatively speaking, it is a boon; in other words, it is an evil that spares us greater evils. And that is precisely why men have such a great tendency to avoid labor, when, without recourse to it, they believe they can reap its rewards.

Others say that labor is in itself a boon; that apart from the results it brings in terms of production, it strengthens man morally and physically and is a source of happiness and health. All this is very true, and reveals once again the marvelous fecundity of God's providential design so abundantly evident in all His handiwork. Yes, even apart from its results in terms of production, labor promises man, as its supplementary rewards, strength of body and joy of soul; and since we have said that idleness is the mother of all vices, we must also recognize that labor is the father of many virtues.

But while all this is very true, it in no way changes the natural and irresistible bent of the human heart nor the attitude that causes us not to seek work for its own sake. We always compare our labor with its results. We do not devote more effort to a given task if we can accomplish it with less; nor, when confronted with two toilsome tasks, do we choose the greater. We are more inclined to diminish the ratio of effort to result, and if, in so doing, we gain a little leisure, nothing will stop us from using it, for the sake of additional benefits, in enterprises more in keeping with our tastes.

The Roots of War

Man's universal practice, indeed, is conclusive in this regard. Always and everywhere, we find that he looks upon toil as the disagreeable aspect, and on satisfaction as the compensatory aspect, of his condition. Always and everywhere, we find that, as far as he is able, he places the burden of his toil upon animals, the wind, steam, or other forces of Nature, or, alas! upon his fellow men, if he can gain mastery over them. In this last case, let me repeat, for it is too often forgotten, the labor has not been lessened; it has merely been shifted to other shoulders.^[3]

Man, thus confronted with a choice of pains, the pains of want and the pains of toil, and driven by self- interest, seeks a means of avoiding them both in so far as possible. And it is then that plunder presents itself as the solution to his problem. He says to himself: It is true that I have no means of procuring the things necessary for my preservation and my enjoyment—food, clothing, and shelter—unless these things have previously been produced by labor. But they need not necessarily be produced by my labor. They need only have been produced by someone, provided I am the stronger.

Such is the origin of war.

I shall not dwell long on the consequences.

When things come to this pass, when one man or one nation labors while another man or another nation lies in wait, ready to spring and to seize the fruits when the labor is completed, the reader can appreciate at a glance what a loss of human energy is entailed.

On the one hand, the plunderer has not been able, as he had hoped, to avoid every kind of labor. Armed plunder itself requires effort and sometimes tremendous effort. Thus, while the producer devotes his time to creating the objects fitted to yield satisfactions, the plunderer uses his time in preparing the means of stealing them. But when the work of violence has been consummated or attempted, the objects of satisfaction are neither more nor less plentiful. They may satisfy the wants of different persons, but they cannot satisfy a greater number of wants. Thus, all the efforts that the plunderer has expended for plunder, and in addition those that he has not expended for production, are entirely lost, if not for him, at least for mankind.

Nor is this all. In the majority of cases a similar loss is involved for the producer. It is not at all likely that he will passively await, without taking precautionary measures, the event that threatens him; and all his precautions, weapons, fortifications, munitions, drill, are labor, and labor forever lost, not only for him who looks to it for his security, but for the human race.

But, if the producer does not feel that, by thus undergoing double labor, he will be strong enough to resist the threatened invasion, the situation is much worse, and the waste of human energies is on an even larger scale; for in that case his work stops altogether, since no man is disposed to produce merely to be plundered.

As for the moral consequences, the manner in which both parties are affected, the result is no less disastrous. God decreed that man should wage war only against Nature, peacefully, and should reap directly from her the fruits of victory. When he gains dominion over Nature only through the indirect means of dominion over his fellow men, his mission has been perverted; he has turned his faculties in a wrong direction. Just consider, for example, the virtue of foresight, the anticipatory view of the future, which in a certain manner elevates us to the realm of Providence, for to foresee, to look ahead, is also to provide, to look out for;^[4] consider how differently it is employed by the producer and by the plunderer.

The producer must learn the relation between cause and effect. To this end, he studies the laws of the physical universe and seeks to bring them more and more to his aid. If he observes his fellow men, it is for the purpose of foreseeing their desires and providing for them, in the hope of a return.

The plunderer does not observe Nature. And if he observes his fellow men, it is as a hawk spies out its prey, seeking a way to weaken it, to take it unawares.

The same differences are to be observed in the other faculties and extend to men’s ways of thinking.

Plunder by means of war is not an accidental, isolated, temporary phenomenon; it is a very widespread and constant fact. Only labor is more permanent.

Show me, then, a place on the globe where two races of men, one a race of conquerors, and the other a race of conquered, are not superimposed. Show me in Europe or in Asia or in the islands of the sea a favored spot still occupied by its original inhabitants. If the migrations of peoples have spared no land, it is because war has been a universal phenomenon.

The traces war has left are equally widespread. Apart from the blood it has spilled, the booty it has captured, the minds it has warped, the faculties it has perverted, it has everywhere left scars, and among them must be listed slavery and aristocracy.

Man has not been content to plunder wealth as rapidly as it is produced; he has seized upon wealth already created, capital in all its forms. He has especially cast his eyes upon its most stable form, landed property. And finally, he has seized upon man himself. For since human faculties are a means of production, he has found it quicker to seize them than to seize their products.

What powerful disturbing factors these great events have been, what obstacles to the natural progress destined for mankind! If we take into account the extent to which labor has been wasted by war, if we consider the extent to which what remained of the product of labor has been concentrated in the hands of a few conquerors, we can well understand why the masses are destitute, for their destitution cannot be explained in our day on the hypothesis of liberty.

How the Warlike Spirit Is Fostered

Aggressor nations are subject to reprisals. They often attack; sometimes they have to defend themselves. When they are on the defensive, they feel that justice is on their side, and that their cause is holy. Then they laud courage, devotion, patriotism. But, alas! They carry these ideas over into their wars of aggression. And in that case what is patriotism?

When two races, one victorious and idle, the other conquered and humiliated, occupy the same land, everything that arouses likes and desires is the portion of the former. To it belong the leisure, gala affairs, love of the arts, wealth, military pomp and parades, grace, elegance, literature, poetry. To the conquered belong calloused hands, desolate hovels, repulsive clothing.

The consequence is that the ideas and attitudes of the dominant race, always associated with its military ascendancy, determine public opinion. Men, women, children, all place the soldier’s way of life above that of the worker, war above labor, plunder above production. The conquered race itself shares this sentiment, and when it overcomes its oppressors, it shows itself in its process of readjustment disposed to imitate them—more than disposed, indeed, for this imitation becomes a frenzy.

How War Ends

Since the spirit of plunder, like the urge to produce, has its origin in the human heart, the laws of the social world would never be harmonious, even in the limited sense that I have indicated, if in the long run the urge to produce were not destined to overcome the spirit of plunder.

Notes

1. Charles Comte (1782-1837), French economist, son-in-law of J. B. Say. Co-editor, with Charles Dunoyer, of Le Censeur européen.—Translator.
2. Saint-Marc Girardin (1801-1873), literary critic and scholar, professor of literature in the Sorbonne, member of the French Academy, also active in political life.—Translator.
3. We forget this when we ask: Is slave labor cheaper or more expensive than free labor?
4. In French, prévoir and pourvoir.—Translator.

It is not within the province of any branch of human knowledge to give the ultimate reason for things.

Man suffers; society suffers. We ask why. This is equivalent to asking why God has given man feeling and free will. We know on this subject only what is revealed to us by the faith in which we believe.

But whatever may have been God’s plan, what we do know as a positive fact, what human knowledge can take as a starting point, is that man was created a sentient being endowed with free will.

This is so true that I defy anyone who may be astonished at it to conceive of a living, thinking, desiring, loving, acting being —of anything, in a word, resembling man — yet lacking in sensibility or free will.

Could God have done differently? Of course, our reason says yes, but our imagination will forever say no; so radically impossible is it for us to think of man as being without this double attribute. Now, to be sentient is to be capable of receiving identifiable sensations, that is, sensations that are pleasant or painful. Hence well-being and suffering. By the very fact of creating sensibility, God permitted evil or the possibility of evil.

In giving us free will, He has endowed us with the faculty, at least to a certain extent, of avoiding what is evil and seeking after what is good. Free will presupposes intelligence and is associated with it. What good would it be to have the power to choose, if the power to examine, to compare, and to judge were not joined to it? Thus, every man born into the world possesses a motive force and an intellect.

The motive force is that inner, irresistible drive, the very essence of all our energy, which impels us to shun evil and to seek after the good. We call it the instinct of self-preservation, personal interest, or self-interest.

This impulse has sometimes been decried, sometimes misunderstood, but there can be no question as to its existence. We seek indefeasibly everything that to our mind can improve our lot; we avoid everything that is likely to impair it. This fact is at least as certain as that every molecule of matter possesses centripetal and centrifugal force. And even as this double movement of attraction and repulsion is the great motive force of the physical universe, so the double impulse of human attraction toward happiness and human aversion to pain is the great motive force of the social machine.

Intelligence

But it is not enough that man should be irresistibly disposed to prefer good to evil; it is also necessary for him to distinguish between them. And this God has provided for by giving man the complex and marvelous mechanism called intelligence. To direct our attention, to compare, to judge, to reason, to relate cause and effect, to remember, to foresee — such are, if I may so express myself, the moving cogs of this wonderful machine.

The driving force that is in each of us moves at the direction of our intellect. But our intellect is imperfect. It is subject to error. We compare, we judge, we act accordingly; but we can be wrong, make a bad choice, turn toward evil, mistaking it for the good, or we may shun the good, mistaking it for evil. This is the first source of social discord; it is inevitable for the very reason that the mainspring of human nature, self-interest, is not, like attraction in the material world, a blind force, but one guided by an imperfect intellect. Let us therefore clearly realize that we shall find harmony only with this restriction attached to it. God has seen fit to establish the social order, or harmony, not upon the basis of perfection, but upon that of man’s perfectibility. Yes, if our intellect is imperfect, it is also perfectible. It develops, enlarges, corrects its errors; it repeats and verifies its operations; at every instant experience sets it right, and responsibility holds over our heads a whole system of punishments and rewards. Every step that we take toward error plunges us more deeply into suffering, so that the warning signal does not fail to make itself heard, and our decisions, and consequently our acts, are sooner or later inevitably set aright.

Under the impulse that actuates him, man, eager to pursue happiness, quick to seize hold of it, is quite likely to seek his own good in another’s harm. This is a second and fertile source of discordant social relations. But their field is limited; they are inevitably eliminated by the law of solidarity. The activity of one individual thus misdirected provokes the opposition of all other individuals, who, being hostile to evil by their nature, reject injustice and punish it.

The Source of Progress

In this way progress is achieved, and it is nonetheless progress for being dearly bought. It is the result of a natural, universal drive that is innate, directed by an intellect that often errs, and subject to a will that is often perverse. Halted in its course by error and injustice, it surmounts these obstacles with the all-powerful aid of responsibility and solidarity — a help that is ever present, since it stems from the obstacles themselves.

This inner, indestructible, universal motive force that resides in every individual and makes of him an active being, this tendency of every man to seek happiness and to shun misery, this product, this effect, this necessary complement of sensibility, without which the latter would be merely a meaningless burden, this primordial phenomenon which is the origin of all human action, this attracting and repelling force which we have called the mainspring of the social machine, has been disparaged by most social philosophers and political theorists; and this is certainly one of the strangest aberrations to be found in the annals of science.

It is true that self-interest is the cause of all the evils, as well as all the benefits, that can fall to the lot of man. This cannot fail to be the case, since self-interest determines all our actions. Certain political theorists, seeing this, have conceived of no better way to cut off evil at its roots than to stifle self-interest. But, since by this act they would also destroy the very motive force of our activity, they thought it best to endow us with a different motive force: devotion and self-sacrifice. They hoped that henceforth all social transactions and arrangements would be carried out, at their bidding, on the principle of self-abnegation. People are no longer to seek their own good but others’; the admonitions of pain and pleasure are no longer to count for anything, any more than the punishments and rewards of responsibility. All the laws of nature are to be overturned; the spirit of self-sacrifice is to take the place of the instinct of self-preservation; in a word, no one is ever to consider his own personality except to hasten to sacrifice it to the common good. It is from in their own hearts so that it is this complete transformation of the human heart that certain political theorists, who believe themselves to be very religious, expect the coming of perfect social harmony. They forget to tell us how they propose to carry out the indispensable preliminary, the transformation of the human heart.

Let Them Try It

If they are mad enough to undertake it, they will certainly not be strong enough to achieve it. Do they desire the proof? Let them try the experiment on themselves; let them try to stifle self-interest no longer evidenced in the most ordinary acts of their lives. They will not be long in admitting their own inability to do so. How, then, do they presume to impose upon all men, without exception, a doctrine to which they themselves cannot submit?

I confess that it is impossible for me to find anything religious, except in outward appearance and at the very most in intention, in these affected theories, these impracticable maxims, to which their authors give lip service while they continue to act like the common run of humanity. Is it true religion that inspires in these Catholic economists the presumptuous thought that God has done His work badly and that they must set it right? Bossuet^¹ was not of this opinion when he said, "Man aspires to happiness; he cannot do otherwise."

Tirades against self-interest will never have great scientific significance; for by its very nature it is indestructible, or at least it cannot be destroyed within man without destroying man himself. All that religion, morality, and political economy can do is to enlighten us regarding this impulse, to show us not only the immediate but also the ultimate consequences of the acts that it prompts within us. Greater and constantly increasing satisfaction following a momentary sensation of pain; long and constantly aggravated suffering following a momentary pleasure: this, in the last analysis, is moral good and evil. What determines man’s choice in favor of virtue must be his higher, enlightened self-interest, but basically self-interest it will always be.

If it is strange that people have decried self-interest, not only in its immoral abuses, but also as the providential motive force of all human activity, it is even more strange that they have not taken it into account and have felt that they could work in the social sciences without reference to it.

With the unaccountable folly of self-pride, political theorists have, in general, considered themselves the guardians and directors of this motive force. For every one of them the point of departure is always the same: Assuming that humanity is a flock of sheep and that I am the shepherd, how shall I set about making humanity happy? Or else: Given, on the one hand, a certain quantity of clay, and on the other, a potter, what must the potter do to make the best possible use of the clay?

Our political theorists may differ on how to decide who is the best potter, or who can mold the clay most effectively; but they agree on this point, that their function is to mold the human clay, just as it is the role of the clay to be molded by them. They establish between themselves, in their capacity as the lawgivers, and the rest of mankind a relationship analogous to that of guardian and ward. It never occurs to them that man is a living body, feeling, willing, acting in obedience to laws that it is not their province to invent, since these laws already exist, even less to impose, but rather to study. It does not occur to them that mankind is composed of a great host of beings in every way similar to themselves, in no way their inferiors or subject to them; that their fellow men are endowed both with an impulse to act and with intelligence to choose; that in everything men do they are affected by the promptings of responsibility and solidarity; and that, finally, from all these phenomena there results a pattern of already existing relations that it is not the province of the social sciences to create, as these theorists imagine, but to observe.

Rousseau’s Error

Rousseau was, I believe, the political theorist who most naively exhumed from antiquity this idea, which had already been resurrected by the Greeks, of the omnipotence of the lawgiver. Convinced that the social order is a human invention, he compares it to a machine. Men are the cogs; the prince makes it run. The lawgiver invents it at the bidding of the political theorist, who thus, in the last analysis, activates and controls the human race. That is why the political theorist never fails to address the lawgiver in the imperative mood; he orders him to give the orders: "Establish your nation on such and such a principle; give it good manners and customs; make it bow to the authority of religion; orient it toward war or commerce or agriculture or virtue, etc., etc." The more modest among them hide behind the anonymity of the passive voice. "Idlers will not be tolerated in the republic; the population will be suitably distributed between the cities and the country; steps will be taken so that there will be neither rich nor poor; etc., etc."

These formulas attest to the inordinate presumption of those who use them. Implicit in them is a conception of man that leaves the human race not one shred of self-respect.

I know of no doctrine more false in theory or more disastrous in practice. On both scores it leads to lamentable consequences.

It gives rise to the view that the social economy is an artificial arrangement that has sprung from the brain of an inventor. Every political theorist, therefore, constitutes himself an inventor forthwith. His greatest desire is to win acceptance for the machine he has invented; his greatest preoccupation is to represent all other proposed social orders as detestable and especially that which springs spontaneously from the nature of man and the nature of things. Books conceived according to this plan are and can be only a long tirade against society.

This false science does not study the concatenation of cause and effect. It does not investigate the good and the evil that acts produce, leaving it afterwards to the motive force of society to select the course to be followed. No, it enjoins, it restrains, it imposes, and if it does not have the power to do these things, at least it gives advice; like a physicist who would say to a stone, "There is nothing to hold you up; therefore I order you to fall, or at least I advise you to fall." It is on this principle that M. Droz² has said, "The aim of political economy is to make prosperity as general as possible"; a definition very favorably received by the socialists because it opens the door to every utopian scheme and leads to regimentation. What would people think of M. Arago³ if he began his course of lectures in this fashion: "The aim of astronomy is to make gravitation as general as possible"? It is true that men are animate beings, endowed with will power and enjoying freedom of choice. But there is also a kind of inner force in them, a kind of gravitation; the question is to know toward what they gravitate. If it is inevitably toward evil, then there is no remedy, and certainly none will come from the political theorist, who as a man is subject to the same unfortunate tendency as the rest of mankind. If it is toward the good, the motive force is ready made; science has no need of replacing it with coercion or advice. Its role is to enlighten men’s free will, to show the relation between cause and effect, confident under the influence of truth, “prosperity tends to become as general as possible.”

A Crushing Responsibility

In practice, the doctrine that places the motive force of society, not in all mankind and in the nature of man, but in lawgivers and in governments, has even more unfortunate consequences. It tends to weigh down the government with a crushing responsibility that does not belong to it. If there is suffering, it is the fault of the government; if there is poverty, the government is to blame. For is not the government the universal motive force? If this motive force is not good, we must destroy it and choose another. Or else the blame is placed on political economy itself, and in recent times we have heard it repeated ad nauseam: "All the suffering of society can be attributed to political economy."⁴ Why not, when it is presented as having for its goal the securing of men’s happiness without any effort on their part? When such ideas are current, the last thing that occurs to men is to turn their gaze upon themselves, and to see whether the real cause of their woes is not their own ignorance and injustice — their ignorance, which exposes them to the law of responsibility; their injustice, which brings down upon them the action of the law of solidarity. How could men dream of blaming themselves for their woes when they have been persuaded that by nature they are inert, that the source of all action, and consequently of all responsibility, lies outside themselves, in the will of the sovereign and of the lawgiver?

If I had to point out the characteristic trait that differentiates socialism from the science of economics, I should find it here. Socialism includes a countless number of sects. Each one has its own utopia, and we may well say that they are so far from agreement that they wage bitter war upon one another. Between M. Blanc’s organized social workshops and M. Proudhon’s anarchy, between Fourier’s association and M. Cabet’s communism, there is certainly all the difference between night and day. What, then, is the common denominator to which all forms of socialism are reducible, and what is the bond that unites them against natural society, or society as planned by Providence? There is none except this: They do not want natural society.

What they do want is an artificial society, which has come forth full-grown from the brain of its inventor. It is true that each one desires to play Jupiter to this Minerva; it is true that each one fondly caresses his own invention and dreams of his own social order. But what they have in common is their refusal to recognize in mankind either the motive force that impels men toward the good or the self-healing power that delivers them from evil. They quarrel over who will mold the human clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mold. Mankind is not in their eyes a living and harmonious being endowed by God Himself with the power to progress and to survive, but an inert mass that has been waiting for them to give it feeling and life; human nature is not a subject to be studied, but matter on which to perform experiments.

The Economic Approach

Political economy, on the contrary, after first establishing the fact that within every man are the forces of impulsion and repulsion that together constitute the motive power of society, after making certain that this motive force tends toward what is good, does not propose to destroy it and to replace it with another of its own creation. Political economy studies the highly varied and complex social phenomena to which this motive force gives rise.

Does this mean that political economy has no more to do with social progress than the study of astronomy has to do with the actual movement of the heavenly bodies? Certainly not. Political economy deals with beings who possess intelligence and free will and as such — let us never forget — are subject to error. Their tendency is toward the good; but they can be mistaken. The utilitarian function of science, therefore, is not to create causes and effects, not to change man’s natural bent, not to foist upon him social orders, injunctions, or even advice, but to show him the good and the evil that results from his own decisions.

Thus, political economy is a science concerned exclusively with the observation and description of phenomena. It does not say to men: "I urge you, I advise you, not to get too close to the fire"; or: "I have thought up a social order; the gods have inspired me to create institutions that will keep you far enough away from the fire." No; political economy notes that fire burns, announces the fact, proves it, and does the same for all similar phenomena of the moral or economic order, convinced that this is all that is necessary. It assumes that an unwillingness to be burned to death is a basic, innate attitude that it did not create and that it cannot alter.

Differences by which Men Grow

Political economists cannot always be in agreement, but it is easy to see that their differences are of quite another kind from those that divide the socialists. Two men who devote themselves to observing the same phenomenon and its effects, like rent, for example, or exchange or competition, may not arrive at the same conclusion; but this proves nothing except that one of the two, at least, has observed badly. The work will have to be done over. With the help of other investigators the chances are that the truth will finally be discovered. That is why — provided only that every economist, like every astronomer, keeps himself informed on the advances his predecessors have made — this science cannot fail to contribute to progress and consequently to be ever more useful, constantly correcting past errors in observation, and continually adding new observations to those already made.

But the socialists — isolating themselves from one another, so that they may concoct, each one on his own, artificial contrivances out of their own imaginations —could go on pursuing their investigations in this way through all eternity without ever coming to an agreement and without one man’s work ever in any way helping another’s. Say profited from Smith’s investigations; Rossi, from Say’s; Blanqui and Joseph Gamier, from those of all their predecessors. But Plato, Sir Thomas More, Harrington,⁵ Fénelon, Fourier may revel to their heart’s delight in drawing up their Republics, their Utopias, their Oceanas, their Salentes, their Phalansteries, without there ever being any connection between any one of these flights of fancy and the others. These dreamers draw it all, men and things alike, out of their own heads. They dream up a social order not connected with the human heart; then they invent a new human heart to go with their social order…
 

There have been such waves before, as in the France of 1847 when Frederic Bastiat was doing his best to build the case for free trade. The following explanation, based upon Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe, is excerpted from Economic Sophisms by Bastiat. It is well worth reading and pondering in 1973.

"Explain to me the functioning and the effects of protectionism."

"That is not so easy. Before considering the more complicated cases, one should study the simpler ones."

"Take the simplest case you wish."

"You remember how Robinson Crusoe managed to make a board when he had no saw?"

"Yes. He cut down a tree; then, by trimming the trunk, first on one side and then on the other, with his axe, he reduced it to the thickness of a plank."

"And that cost him a great deal of labor?"

"Two full weeks."

"And what did he live on during that time?"

"On his provisions."

"And what happened to the axe?"

"It became very dull as a result."

"Quite right. But perhaps you do not know this: just as he was about to strike the first blow with his axe, Robinson Crusoe noticed a plank cast up on the beach by the waves."

"Oh, what a lucky accident! He ran to pick it up?"

"That was his first impulse; but then he stopped and reasoned as follows:

"’If I go to get that plank, it will cost me only the exertion of carrying it, and the time needed to go down to the beach and climb back up the cliff.

"Tut if I make a plank with my axe, first of all, I shall be assuring myself two weeks’ labor; then, my axe will become dull, which will provide me with the job of sharpening it; and I shall consume my provisions, making a third source of employment, since I shall have to replace them. Now, labor is wealth. It is clear that I shall only be hurting my own interests if I go down to the beach to pick up that piece of driftwood. It is vital for me to protect my personal labor, and, now that I think of it, I can even create additional labor for myself by going down and kicking that plank right back into the sea!’ "

"What an absurd line of reasoning!"

"That may be. It is nonetheless the same line of reasoning that is adopted by every nation that protects itself by interdicting the entry of foreign goods. It kicks back the plank that is offered it in exchange for a little labor, in order to give itself more labor. There is no labor, even including that of the customs official, in which it does not see some profit. It is represented by the pains Robinson Crusoe took to return to the sea the present it was offering him. Consider the nation as a collective entity, and you will not find an iota of difference between its line of reasoning and that of Robinson Crusoe."

"Did he not see that he could devote the time he could have saved to making something else?

"What else?"

"As long as a person has wants to satisfy and time at his disposal, he always has something to do. I am not obliged to specify the kind of work he could undertake to do."

"I can certainly specify precisely the kind that probably escaped his attention."

"And I maintain, for my part, that, with incredible blindness, he confused labor with its result, the end with the means, and I am going to prove it to you…."

"You do not have to. The fact still remains that this is an illustration of the system of restriction or interdiction in its simplest form. If it seems absurd to you in this form, it is because the two functions of producer and consumer are here combined in the same individual."

"Let us therefore proceed to a more complicated case."

"Gladly. Some time later, after Robinson had met Friday, they pooled their resources and began to co-operate in common enterprises. In the morning, they hunted for six hours and brought back four baskets of game. In the evening, they worked in the garden for six hours and obtained four baskets of vegetables.

"One day a longboat landed on the Isle of Despair. A handsome foreigner disembarked and was admitted to the table of our two recluses. He tasted and highly praised the products of the garden, and, before taking leave of his hosts, he addressed them in these words:

"’Generous islanders, I dwell in a land where game is much more plentiful than it is here, but where horticulture is unknown. It will be easy for me to bring you four baskets of game every evening if you will give me in exchange only two baskets of vegetables.’

"At these words, Robinson and Friday withdrew to confer, and the debate they had is too interesting for me not to report it here in full.

"Friday: Friend, what do you think of it?

"Robinson: If we accept, we are ruined.

"F.: Are you quite sure of that? Let us reckon up what it comes to.

"R.: It has all been reckoned up, and there can be no doubt about the outcome. This competition will simply mean the end of our hunting industry.

"F.: What difference does that make if we have the game? "R.: You are just theorizing! It will no longer be the product of our labor.

"F.: No matter, since in order to get it we shall have to part with some vegetables!

"R.: Then what shall we gain?

"F.: The four baskets of game cost us six hours of labor. The foreigner gives them to us in exchange for two baskets of vegetables, which take us only three hours to produce. Therefore, this puts three hours at our disposal.

"R.: You ought rather to say that they are subtracted from our productive activity. That is the exact amount of our loss. Labor is wealth, and if we lose one-fourth of our working time, we shall be one-fourth less wealthy.

"F.: Friend, you are making an enormous mistake. We shall have the same amount of game, the same quantity of vegetables, and — into the bargain — three more hours at our disposal. That is what I call progress, or there is no such thing in this world.

"R.: You are talking in generalities! What shall we do with these three hours?

"F.: We shall do something else.

"R.: Ah! I have you there. You are unable to mention anything in particular. Something else, something else — that is very easy to say.

"F.: We can fish; we can decorate our cabin; we can read the Bible.

"R.: Utopia! Who knows which of these things we shall do, or whether we shall do any of them?

"F.: Well, if we have no wants to satisfy, we shall take a rest. Is not rest good for something?

"R.: But when people lie around doing nothing, they die of hunger.

"F.: My friend, you are caught in a vicious circle. I am talking about a kind of rest that will subtract nothing from our supply of game and vegetables. You keep forgetting that by means of our foreign trade, nine hours of labor will provide us with as much food as twelve do today.

"R.: It is very clear that you were not brought up in Europe. Had you ever read the Moniteur industriel, it would have taught you this:’All time saved is a dead loss. What counts is not consumption, but production. All that we consume, if it is not the direct product of our labor, counts for nothing. Do you want to know whether you are rich? Do not measure the extent of your satisfactions, but of your exertion.’ This is what the Moniteur industriel would have taught you. As for myself, being no theorist, all I see is the loss of our hunting.

"F.: What an extraordinary inversion of ideas! But…. "

R.: But me no buts. Moreover, there are political reasons for rejecting the selfish offers of the perfidious foreigner. "

F.: Political reasons!

"R.: Yes. First, he is making us these offers only because they are advantageous to him.

"F.: So much the better, since they are so for us too.

"R.: Then, by this traffic, we shall make ourselves dependent upon him.

"F.: And he will make himself dependent on us. We shall have need of his game; and he, of our vegetables; and we shall all live in great friendship.

"R.: You are just following some abstract system! Do you want me to shut you up for good?

"F.: Go on and try. I am still waiting for a good reason.

"R.: Suppose the foreigner learns to cultivate a garden, and that his island is more fertile than ours. Do you see the consequence?

"F.: Yes. Our relations with the foreigner will be severed. He will no longer take our vegetables, since he will have them at home with less labor. He will no longer bring us game, since we shall have nothing to give him in exchange, and we shall then be in precisely the same situation that you want us to be in today.

"R.: Improvident savage! You do not see that after destroying our hunting industry by flooding us with game, he will destroy our gardening industry by flooding us with vegetables.

"F.: But this will happen only so long as we shall be in a position to give him something else, that is to say, so long as we shall be able to find something else to produce with a saving in labor for ourselves.

"R.: Something else, something else! You always come back to that. You are up in the clouds, my friend; there is nothing practical in your ideas.

"The dispute went on for a long time and left each one, as often happens, unchanged in his convictions. However, since Robinson had great influence over Friday, he made his view prevail; and when the foreigner came to learn how his offer had been received, Robinson said to him:

"’Foreigner, in order for us to accept your proposal, we must be very sure about two things:

"’First, that game is not more plentiful on your island than on ours; for we want to fight only on equal terms.

"’Second, that you will lose by this bargain. For, as in every exchange there is necessarily a gainer and a loser, we should be victimized if you were not the loser. What do you say?’

"’Nothing,’ said the foreigner. And, bursting into laughter, he re-embarked in his longboat."

For further discussion of the Bastiat philosophy of free trade see: The Tariff Idea by W. M. Curtiss                              80 pages $1.00

Also, for a better understanding of the close relationship between protectionism and inflation, see:

What You Should Know About Inflation by Henry Hazlitt                               152 pages $.95

What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard                      49 pages $1.25

All available from

THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION
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Since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain—and since labor is pain in itself—it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. His­tory shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither re­ligion nor morality can stop it.

When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.

It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the meas­ures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.

But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate with­out the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must he entrusted to those who make the laws.

This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, ex­plains the almost universal per­version of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the in­vincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.

Victims of Lawful Plunder

Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are vic­tims. Thus, when plunder is or­ganized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter—by peaceful or revolution­ary means—into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two en­tirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws!

Until that happens, the few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But then, participation in the making of law becomes uni­versal. And then, men seek to bal­ance their conflicting interests by universal plunder. Instead of root­ing out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This ob­jective would demand more en­lightenment than they possess.) Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in this legal plunder, even though it is against their own interests.

It is as if it were necessary, be­fore a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribu­tion—some for their evilness, and some for their lack of understand­ing.

The Results of Legal Plunder

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conver­sion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would re­quire volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most strik­ing.

In the first place, it erases from everyone’s conscience the distinc­tion between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality con­tradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" be­cause law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them….

Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.

I could prove this assertion in a thousand ways. But, by way of illustration, I shall limit myself to a subject that has lately occupied the minds of everyone: universal suffrage.

Who Shall Judge?

The followers of Rousseau’s school of thought—who consider themselves far advanced, but whom I consider twenty centuries behind the times—will not agree with me on this. But universal suffrage—using the word in its strictest sense—is not one of those sacred dogmas which it is a crime to examine or doubt. In fact, serious objections may be made to universal suffrage.

In the first place, the word uni­versal conceals a gross fallacy. For example, there are 36 million people in Franc. Thus, to make the right of suffrage universal, there should be 36 million voters. But the most extended system per­mits only 9 million people to vote. Three persons out of four are excluded. And more than this, they are excluded by the fourth. This fourth person advances the principle of incapacity as his rea­son for excluding the others.

Universal suffrage means, then, universal suffrage for those who are capable. But there remains this question of fact: Who is capable? Are minors, females, in­sane persons, and persons who have committed certain major crimes the only ones to be de­termined incapable?

A closer examination of the sub­ject shows us the motive which causes the right of suffrage to be based upon the supposition of in­capacity. The motive is that the elector or voter does not exercise this right for himself alone, but for everybody.

The most extended elective sys­tem and the most restricted elec­tive system are alike in this re­spect. They differ only in respect to what constitutes incapacity. It is not a difference of principle, but merely a difference of degree.

If, as the republicans of our present-day Greek and Roman schools of thought pretend, the right of suffrage arrives with one’s birth, it would be an in­justice for adults to prevent wom­en and children from voting. Why are they prevented? Because they are presumed to be incapable. And why is incapacity a motive for exclusion? Because it is not the voter alone who suffers the conse­quences of his vote; because each vote touches and affects everyone in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safe­guards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

I know what might be said in answer to this; what the objec­tions might be. But this is not the place to exhaust a controversy of this nature. I wish merely to ob­serve here that this controversy over universal suffrage (as well as most other political questions) which agitates, excites, and over­throws nations, would lose nearly all of its importance if the law had always been what it ought to be.

In fact, if law were restricted to protecting all persons, all liber­ties, and all properties; if law were nothing more than the or­ganized combination of the indi­vidual’s right to self-defense; if law were the obstacle, the check, the punisher of all oppression and plunder—is it likely that we citi­zens would then argue much about the extent of the franchise?

Under these circumstances, is it likely that the extent of the right to vote would endanger that supreme good, the public peace? Is it likely that the excluded classes would refuse to peaceably await the coming of their right to vote? Is it likely that those who had the right to vote would jeal­ously defend their privilege?

If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s in­terest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?

The Fatal Idea of Legal Plunder

But on the other hand, imagine that this fatal principle has been introduced: Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protec­tion, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few—whether farmers, manufacturers, ship-owners, art­ists, or comedians. Under these circumstances, then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so.

The excluded classes will furi­ously demand their right to vote—and will overthrow society rather than not to obtain it. Even beggars and vagabonds will then prove to you that they also have an incontestable title to vote. They will say to you:

"We cannot buy wine, tobacco, or salt without paying the tax. And a part of the tax that we pay is given by law—in privileges and subsidies—to men who are richer than we are. Others use the law to raise the prices of bread, meat, iron, or cloth. Thus, since everyone else uses the law for his own profit, we also would like to use the law for our own profit. We demand from the law the right to relief, which is the poor man’s plunder. To obtain this right, we also should be voters and legis­lators in order that we may organ­ize Beggary on a grand scale for our own class, as you have or­ganized Protection on a grand scale for your class. Now don’t tell us beggars that you will act for us, and then toss us… [a few] francs to keep us quiet, like throw­ing us a bone to gnaw. We have other claims. And anyway, we wish to bargain for ourselves as other classes have bargained for themselves!"

And what can you say to an­swer that argument!

As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose—that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to par­ticipate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be preju­dicial, dominant, and all-absorb­ing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious….

How to Identify Legal Plunder

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of an­other by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without com­mitting a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil it­self, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case—is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, de­fending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obli­gated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this pro­cedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.

Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pre­tense of organizing it….

The Choice Before Us

This question of legal plunder must be settled once and for all, and there are only three ways to settle it:

1.                   The few plunder the many.

2.                   Everybody plunders every­body.

3.                   Nobody plunders anybody.

We must make our choice among limited plunder, universal plunder, and no plunder. The law can fol­low only one of these three.

Limited legal plunder: This sys­tem prevailed when the right to vote was restricted. One would turn back to this system to pre­vent the invasion of socialism.

Universal legal plunder: We have been threatened with this system since the franchise was made universal. The newly en­franchised majority has decided to formulate law on the same prin­ciple of legal plunder that was used by their predecessors when the vote was limited.

No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic….

The Proper Function of the Law

And, in all sincerity, can any­thing more than the absence of plunder be required of the law? Can the law—which necessarily requires the use of force—ration­ally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it and, consequently, turning might against right. This is the most fatal and most illogical social per­version that can possibly be imag­ined. It must be admitted that the true solution—so long searched for in the area of social relation­ships—is contained in these simple words: Law is organized justice.

Now this must be said: When justice is organized by law—that is, by force—this excludes the idea of using law (force) to or­ganize any human activity what­ever, whether it be labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, art, or religion. The or­ganizing by law of any one of these would inevitably destroy the essential organization—justice. For truly, how can we imagine force being used against the liber­ty of citizens without its also being used against justice, and thus act­ing against its proper purpose?

Here I encounter the most pop­ular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philan­thropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citi­zen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intel­lectual, and moral self-improve­ment. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend wel­fare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat again: these two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other. We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.

Bastiat’s The Law, from which the above paragraphs are ex­cerpted, is available from the Foundation for Economic Educa­tion, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533. 

Frederic Bastiat

I wish someone would offer a prize—not of a hundred francs but of a million, with crowns, medals, and ribbons—for a good, simple, intelligible definition of the term, The State.

What an immense service such a definition would render to society!

The State! What is it? Where is it? What does it do? What should it do? We only know that it is a mysterious being; and, it is certainly the most petitioned, the most harassed, the most bus­tling, the most advised, the most reproached, the most invoked, and the most challenged of any being in the world.

Translated and condensed by Mallory Cross, formerly of the Foundation staff, from "L’Etat" in Sophismes Economiques, Volume I. Paris: Guillaumin, 1878. See also Miss Cross’s article on page 56 of this issue.

I have not the honor of knowing my reader, but I would stake ten to one that sometime in the last six months you have designed Uto­pias, and if so, that you are look­ing to The State for the realiza­tion of them.

But alas! That poor unfortunate being, like Figaro, knows not which plea to hear nor where to turn. The hundred thousand mouths of the press and of the platform cry out all at once—

Organize work and the workmen. Cover the country with railways. Irrigate the plains.

Reforest the hills.

Establish model farms.

Colonize Algeria.

Educate the youth.

Assist the aged.

Equalize the profits of all trades.

Lend money without interest to all who wish to borrow.

Emancipate Italy, Poland, and Hungary.

Encourage the arts, and train mu­sicians and dancers for us.

Restrict commerce, and at the same time create a merchant marine.

Discover truth, and put a bit of sense into our heads. The mission of The State is to enlighten, to develop, to ennoble, to strengthen, and to sanctify the soul of the people.

"Wait, Gentlemen! A little pa­tience," says The State beseech­ingly. "I will try to satisfy you, but for that I must have some re­sources. I have prepared plans for five or six entirely new taxes, the mildest in the world. You will see how gladly people will pay them."

But then a great hue and cry arises: "No! No! A fine thing—doing something with resources! This is hardly worthy of The State! Instead of loading us with new taxes, we call upon you to re­peal the old ones. Decrease the salt tax, the liquor tax, the stamp tax, customhouse duties, monopoly li­cense fees, and tolls."

In the midst of this tumult, the people have changed their govern­ment two or three times for fail­ing to satisfy all their demands. To date, everything presenting it­self under the name of The State is soon overthrown by the people, precisely because it fails to fulfill the somewhat contradictory fea­tures of its platform.

I fear we are, in this respect, the dupes of one of the strangest illusions which has ever taken possession of the human mind.

The Origin of Plunder

Man recoils from effort, from suffering. Yet, he is condemned by nature to the suffering of pri­vation if he does not make the effort to work. He has only a choice then, between these two: privation, and work. How can he manage to avoid both? He always has and always will find, only one means: to enjoy the labor of others; to arrange it so that the effort and the satisfaction do not fall upon each in their natural proportion, but that some would bear all the effort while all the satisfaction would go to others. This is the origin of slavery and plunder, whatever form it takes—whether wars, impositions, vi­olences, restrictions, frauds, etc., monstrous abuses, but in accord with the idea which has given them birth.

Slavery is subsiding, thank heaven, and our disposition to de­fend our property prevents direct and open plunder from being easy. However, there remains the un­fortunate, primitive inclination in all men to divide the lot of life into two parts, throwing the trouble upon others and keeping the satis­faction for themselves. Let us ex­amine a current manifestation of this sad tendency.

The Intermediary

The oppressor no longer uses his own force directly upon his victim. No, our conscience has be­come too sensitive for that. There is still the tyrant and his victim, but between them is an intermedi­ary which is The State—the Law itself. What could be better de­signed to silence our scruples and—more important—to overcome all resistance? Thus do all of us, by various claims and under one pretext or another, appeal to The State:

"I am dissatisfied with the ratio between my labor and my pleas­ures. In order to establish the de­sired balance, I should like to take part of the possessions of others. But that is a dangerous thing. Couldn’t you facilitate it for me? Couldn’t you give me a good post? Or restrain my competitors’ busi­ness? Or perhaps lend me some in­terest-free capital, which you will have taken from its rightful own­ers? Or bring up my children at the taxpayers’ expense? Or grant me a subsidy? Or assure me a pen­sion when I reach my fiftieth year? By this means I shall achieve my goal with an easy con­science, for the law will have acted for me. Thus I shall have all the advantages of plunder, without the risk or the disgrace!"

All of us are petitioning The State in this manner, yet it has been proven that The State has no means of granting privileges to some without adding to the labor of others.

The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeav­ors to live at the expense of every­body.

Today, as in the past, nearly everyone would like to profit by the labor of others. No one dares admit such a feeling; he even hides it from himself. So what does he do? He imagines an in­termediary; he appeals to The State, and every class in its turn comes and says to it: "You, who can do so justifiably and honestly, take from the public; and we will partake of the proceeds."

Alas! The State is only too much disposed to follow this dia­bolical advice; for it is composed of ministers and officials—of men, in short—who, like all other men, desire in their hearts and eagerly seize every opportunity to increase their wealth and influence. The State quickly perceives the advan­tages it can derive from the role entrusted to it by the public. It will be the judge, the master of the destinies of all. It will take a lot: then much will remain for it­self. It will multiply the number of its agents, and increase its functions, until it finally acquires crushing proportions.

The Great Illusion

But the most remarkable thing is the astonishing blindness of the public while all this takes place. In the past, when victorious sol­diers reduced the vanquished to slavery they were barbarous, but they were not foolish. Their ob­ject, like ours, was to live at the expense of others; but they suc­ceeded, where we fail. What are we to think of a people who never seem to realize that reciprocal plunder is no less plunder because it is reciprocal; that it is no less criminal, because it is carried out legally and peacefully; that it adds nothing to the public good, but rather diminishes it by the amount of the cost of that ex­pensive intermediary we call The State?

And this great illusion we have placed, for the edification of the people, as a frontispiece to the Constitution. Here are the first words of the preamble:

"France has constituted itself a Republic to… raise all the citizens to an ever-increasing degree of morality, enlightenment, and well-being."

Thus it is France—an abstrac­tion—which is to raise the French—or realities—to morality, well­being, and so on. Isn’t it our blind attachment to this strange delusion that leads us to expect everything from a power not our own? Isn’t it suggesting that there is, apart from the French people, a virtuous, enlightened, rich being who can and should bestow its favors upon them?

The American Ideal

The Americans develop a dif­ferent idea of the relationship of the citizens with The State, when they placed these simple words at the beginning of their Constitu­tion:

"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, pro­vide for the common defence, pro­mote the general Welfare, and se­cure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain…."

Here is no shadowy creation, no abstraction, from which the citi­zens may demand everything. They expect nothing except from themselves and their own energy.

I contend that the personifica­tion of The State has been in the past and will be in the future, a fertile source of calamities and revolutions. There is the public on one side, The State on the other, considered as two distinct beings; the latter obligated to bestow upon the former, the former hav­ing the right to claim from the latter a flood of human benefits. What must happen?

The State has two hands, one for receiving and the other for giving—a rough hand and a smooth one. The activity of the second is necessarily subordinate to the activity of the first. Strictly speaking, The State can take and not give back. This can be seen and can be explained by the porous, absorbing nature of its hands, which always retain part and sometimes all of what it touches.

But that which is never seen, which never will be seen, and which cannot even be imagined, is that The State can return more to the people than it has taken from them. Therefore it is ridic­ulous for us to appear before The State in the humble attitude of beggars. It is utterly impossible for it to confer a specific benefit upon some of the individuals who make up the community, without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole.

A Great Dilemma: Many Benefits and No Taxes

Our demands, therefore, place The State in an obvious dilemma! If it refuses to grant the request­ed benefit, it is accused of weak­ness, and incapacity. If it tries to grant their requests, it is obliged to load the people with in­creased taxes—to do more harm than good—and to bring upon it­self general displeasure from an­other quarter.

So, the public has two hopes, and The State makes two prom­ises: many benefits and no taxes—hopes and promises, which, being contradictory, can never be real­ized.

Is not this the cause of all our revolutions? For between The State, which lavishly promises the impossible, and the public, whose hopes can never be realized, there come to interpose two types of men: the ambitious and the Uto­pians. The circumstances give them their cue. These office seekers need only cry out to the people: "The authorities are deceiving you. If we were in their place, we would load you with benefits and exempt you from taxes."

And the people believe, and the people hope, and the people substi­tute a new government for the old.

No sooner are their friends in charge of things, than they are called upon to redeem their pledge. "Give us work, bread, assistance, credit, instruction, colonies," say the people, "and meanwhile deliver us, as you promised, from the clutches of the tax gatherer."

The Problem Persists

The new government is no less embarrassed than the former one, for it is easier to promise the im­possible than to do it. It tries to gain time which it needs for ma­turing its vast projects. First it makes a few timid attempts: On one hand, it slightly expands pri­mary education; on the other, it makes a small reduction in the liquor tax. But the contradiction always confronts the administra­tion: If it would be philanthropic, it must attend to its treasury; if it neglects the treasury, it must give up being philanthropic.

These two promises are always and inevitably clashing with one another. To live upon credit, that is, to exhaust the future, is cer­tainly a temporary method of rec­onciling them—an attempt to do a little good now, at the expense of a great deal of harm in the fu­ture. But this procedure calls forth the specter of bankruptcy, which puts an end to credit. What is to be done then? Why then, the new government defends itself boldly. It unites its forces to maintain it­self: It smothers opinion, has re­course to arbitrary measures, ridi­cules its former slogans, declares that it is impossible to govern ex­cept at the risk of being unpopu­lar; in short, it proclaims itself governmental.

And this is what other candi­dates for office are waiting for. They exploit the same illusion, fol­low the same course, obtain the same success, and are soon swal­lowed up in the same abyss.

The Great Society!

The latest manifesto of the Montagnards, which they issued at the time of the presidential elec­tion, concludes with these words:

—"The State ought to give a great deal to the people, and take little from them." It is always the same tactics, or rather, the same mis­take. The State must:

Give free instruction and educa­tion to all the citizens.

Give a general and professional education, as much as possible adapted to the needs, talents, and capacities of each citizen.

Teach every citizen his duty to God, to man, and to himself; develop his perceptions, his aptitudes, and his faculties; teach him, in short, the skill of his trade; make him un­derstand his own interests, and give him a knowledge of his rights.

Place within the reach of all lit­erature and the arts, the heritage of thought, the treasures of the mind, and all those intellectual possessions which elevate and strengthen the soul.

Give compensation for every dis­aster, fire, flood, etc., experienced by a citizen. (The et cetera means more than it says.)

Act as mediator in the relations between capital and labor, and be­come the regulator of credit.

Give substantial encouragement and effectual support to agriculture.

Purchase railroads, canals, and mines—and doubtless administer them with its characteristic indus­trial ability!

Encourage useful experiments, promote and assist them by every means likely to make them success­ful. As a regulator of credit, it will have extensive control over indus­trial and agricultural associations in order to assure their success.

The State must do all this, in addition to the services to which it is already pledged! For instance, it is always to maintain a menac­ing attitude towards foreigners. The signers of the manifesto say that: "Bound together by this holy union, and by the precedents of the French Republic, we carry our wishes and hopes beyond the bar­riers which despotism has raised between nations. The rights which we desire for ourselves, we desire for all those who are oppressed by the yoke of tyranny; we desire that our glorious army should, if necessary, again be the army of liberty."

You see that the gentle hand of The State—that good hand which gives and distributes—will be very busy under the direction of these reformers. You think per­haps it will be the same with thorough hand—that hand which penetrates and takes from our pockets?

Political Promises

Do not deceive yourselves. The politicians would not know their trade, if they had not the art, when showing the gentle hand, to conceal the rough one. Their reign will assuredly be the jubilee of the taxpayers!

"It is luxuries, not necessaries," they say, "which ought to be taxed."

Won’t it be wonderful that the treasury, in overwhelming us with favors, will content itself with curtailing our luxuries!

This is not all. This party of re­formers intends that "taxation shall lose its oppressive character, and be only an act of brother­hood." Good heavens! I know it is the fashion to thrust brotherhood in everywhere, but I did not im­agine it would ever be put into the proclamations of the tax gatherer.

Well, I ask the impartial reader, is this not childishness, and more than that, dangerous childishness? Is it not inevitable that we shall have revolution after revolution, if it is once decided never to stop till this contradiction is realized: "Give nothing to The State and receive much from it"?

Citizens! At all times, two political systems have been in existence, and each can justify itself with good reasons. According to one of them, The State should do a lot, but then it should take a lot. Ac­cording to the other, this twofold activity ought to be limited. We have to choose between these two systems.

But the third system, which partakes of both the others, and consists in exacting everything from The State without giving it anything, is chimerical, absurd, childish, contradictory, and dan­gerous. Those who advocate such a system are only flattering and deceiving you, or at least are de­ceiving themselves.

As for us, we consider that The State is and ought to be nothing whatever but community force or­ganized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens, but, on the con­trary, to guarantee to each his own, and to cause justice and se­curity to reign.

Reprints available, 10 cents each.

***

Government’s First Duty

Such a lawless seizure of property no government worthy of the name will tolerate or condone…. When any individual or organization under whatsoever name attempts to use force to gain his or its ends, they are attempting to usurp governmental functions. This attempt unless promptly and effectively re­strained by legally constituted authority leads to lawlessness, disorder, and anarchy, which is the very negation of all gov­ernment. The law cannot temporize with lawlessness. The first duty of government is to govern, that is, to maintain law and order at all hazards and regardless of expense; only by doing this does it fulfill its legitimate function, which is the protec­tion of life, liberty, and property.

Chief Justice Maxey, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania
Carnegie Illinois Steel Corp. vs. United Steelworkers
of America. [353 Pa. 420, 45 A. ²d 857 (1946)]

We discover that the father of the family has not been able to earn much in that mountainous section of the country. His poorly-clothed chil­dren shiver in the icy blast. The fire is out and the table bare.

On the other side of the mountain in Spain, there are wool, firewood, and corn. But the poor father is for­bidden to use them because they are grown in another country!

By law, the foreign pine may not warm his cabin; his children may not taste the Spanish corn; the wool of Navarre may not warm their cold bodies.

We are told that national interest (general utility) demands this. If this is so, then it must be admitted that national interest is in conflict with justice.

The government has absolute con­trol over the lives of consumers and uses these consumers in the name of national industry. This is an en­croachment upon their liberty. The law forbids the people to exchange their goods and services for the goods and services of their neighbors on the other side of the frontier. Since the willing exchange of goods and services is not immoral, then the law commits an act of injustice.

The writers of the "protectionist school" claim that this is necessary to protect national industry and pub­lic prosperity. Thus the advocates of tariffs and other restrictions against trade are faced with this sad con­clusion: Justice and the public in­terest are incompatible.

Translated by Dean Russell from Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat, Volume 1. Paris: Guillaumin, 1863. Pp. 87-88.

Here is our petition: Please pass a law ordering the closing of all windows, skylights, shutters, cur­tains, and blinds — that is, all openings, holes, and cracks through which the light of the sun is able to enter houses. This free sunlight is hurting the business of us deserving manufacturers of candles. Since we have always served our country well, gratitude demands that our country ought not to abandon us now to this un­equal competition.

We hope that you gentlemen will not regard our petition as mere satire, or refuse it without at least hearing our reasons in support of it.

First, if you make it as difficult as possible for the people to have access to natural light, and thus create an increased demand for artificial light, will not all domestic manufacturers be stimulated thereby?

For example, if more tallow is consumed, naturally there must be more cattle and sheep. As a result, there will also be more meat, wool, and hides. There will even be more manure, which is the basis of agri­culture.

Next, if more oil is consumed for lighting, we shall have extensive olive groves and rape fields.

Also, our wastelands will be covered with pines and other res­inous trees and plants. As a re­sult of this, there will be numerous swarms of bees to increase the production of honey. In fact, all branches of agriculture will show an increased development.

The same applies to the shipping industry. The increased demand for whale oil will then require thousands of ships for whale fish­ing. In a short time, this will re­sult in a navy capable of upholding the honor of our country and grat­ifying the patriotic sentiments of the candlemakers and other per­sons in related industries.

The manufacturers of lighting fixtures — candlesticks, lamps, candelabra, chandeliers, crystals, bronzes, and so on — will be espe­cially stimulated. The resulting warehouses and display rooms will make our present-day shops look poor indeed.

The resin collectors on the heights along the seacoast, as well as the coal miners in the depths of the earth, will rejoice at their higher wages and increased pros­perity. In fact, gentlemen, the con­dition of every citizen of our country — from the wealthiest owner of coal mines to the poorest seller of matches — will be improved by the success of our pe­tition. 

Translated and slightly condensed by Dean Russell from Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat, Volume 1. Paris: Guill­aumin, 1863. pp. 58-59.

***

Ideas On Liberty

How Come?

Though I’ve taken my legal deductions

(My tax-form acumen’s transcendent),

There doesn’t exist

Any place I can list

The Government as a dependent!

TOM TALMAN

Reprinted by Special Permission of THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. Copyright 1955 by the Curtis Publishing Co.

Now here is a footnote to that story that is not generally known. Just as Robinson was striking the first blow with his axe, he saw a plank thrown by the tide upon the seashore. His first impulse was to run and get it, but then he stopped and reasoned as follows:

If I get that plank, it will cost me only the time and trouble of going down to the water’s edge and carrying it back up the cliff. But if I make a plank with my axe, I shall give myself 15 days of labor. In addition, I shall also dull my axe, which means that I shall have the job of sharpening it. Also, I shall have to replace the provi­sions that I consume during my labor. Now everybody knows that labor is wealth. So it is clear that I would be doing a disservice to myself if I accepted that free plank. I must make sure that I al­ways have work to do. Now that I think of it, I can even make additional work for myself by going down and kicking that plank back into the sea!

Now you might think that Robinson’s reasoning was absurd. Nevertheless, it is the same rea­soning that is followed by every nation that uses tariffs and other restrictions against trade in an effort to make more jobs at home. The nation rejects the foreign plank that is offered in exchange for a little work, in order to insure more work by manufacturing its own plank at home. Such a nation even sees a gain in the labor of the customhouse officials — much like Robinson’s decision to return to the sea the present it had given him.

If you think of a nation as a collective being, you can’t find an atom of difference between the reasoning of the tariff advocates in real life and the reasoning of Robinson Crusoe in this fable.

Translated by Dean Russell from Select­ed Works of Frederic Bastiat, Volume 1, Paris: Guillaumin, 1863. pp. 243-244.

As the fable goes, one day a canoe arrived from a foreign island. Since there was plenty of game but no agriculture on that island, the foreigner wanted to trade game for vegetables. He offered to supply Robinson and Friday with all the game they needed — and thus to cut six hours from their working day. In re­turn, they were to give him two baskets of vegetables each day. This would increase the time they devoted to agriculture from six hours to nine hours. Thus the for­eign trade would result in a net saving of three hours of labor each day for both Robinson and Friday.

They walked away from the for­eigner to discuss his offer in private.

It soon developed that Friday was in favor of the trade, and Crusoe was opposed. Their reason­ing went somewhat as follows:

Robinson pointed out to Friday that if they accepted the for­eigner’s offer, their own hunting industry would thereby be ruined. In turn, Friday pointed out to Robinson that they would still have as much game to eat as they now had. True, they would have to work longer at agriculture, but they would still save three hours of labor on the total transaction.

Then Robinson argued that the three hours of saved labor was not a gain but a loss, since everybody knows that labor is wealth. Any­way, what would they do with those three hours?

Friday replied that they could use them to fish, or to improve their house, or to read, or merely to loaf. But Robinson was too firmly grounded in the labor theory of protectionism to be con­vinced. He honestly believed that labor itself (rather than the net product of that labor) is the meas­ure of wealth.

Robinson then added that there were also political reasons for re­jecting the offer of the perfidious foreigner. For example, the for­eigner wouldn’t make the offer un­less he expected to gain from it. Friday agreed, but pointed out that they also would gain from the trade.

Next, Robinson explained to Friday that this trade would make them dependent on the foreigner. Again Friday agreed, but argued that the foreigner would likewise be dependent on them.

Then Robinson pointed out that the foreigner might learn to grow his own vegetables on his own island. If that happened, he would no longer bring game to them, and they might starve. Or, even worse, he might bring vegetables as well as game, and thus destroy two of their industries instead of merely one.

Friday was of the opinion that if the trade ceased altogether, they would be no worse off than now. And if the foreigner brought both game and vegetables, they would then have to produce something else to exchange with him.

But Robinson thought that Friday’s arguments were imprac­tical and based on mere theory. So, refusing to listen further, he returned to the foreigner, and spoke as follows:

"Stranger, before we accept your offer, we must be sure of two things. First, you must assure us that your island is not richer in game than is ours, for we wish to fight with equal weapons. Second, since in all exchange there is necessarily a winner and a loser, you must lose by the exchange. Now what do you say to that?"

"Nothing," said the foreigner. And laughing loudly, he regained his canoe and paddled away.

Translated and condensed by Dean Rus­sell from Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat, Volume 1. Paris: Guillaumin, 1863. pp. 244-247.

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Ideas On Liberty

The Open Door

The redeeming feature in opening our markets to free trade among the so-called "backward" countries of the world is that it would cost us nothing to do so. On net balance, we would gain as much as they. Here is an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that when we glibly talk "free enterprise" we talk it with conviction — not with restriction.

W. M. Curtiss, The Tariff Idea