Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
that paralyzes them with its competition.
If therefore it is appropriate to protect domestic labor against competition from foreign labor, it is no less so to protect human labor against competition from mechanical labor.
[print edition page 89]
So, if he has an ounce of logic in his brain, anyone who supports a protectionist regime should not stop at forbidding foreign products; he ought to forbid even more the products of the shuttle and the plough.
And this is why I much prefer the logic of those men who, speaking out against the invasion of goods from far distant lands, at least have the courage to speak out as well against overproduction due to the inventive power of the human mind.
One of these is M. de Saint-Chamans. “One of the strongest arguments,” he says, “against free trade and the overuse of machines, is that many workers are deprived of work either by foreign competition that closes factories down or by equipment that takes the place of men in the workshops.” (On the Tax System, page 438.)2
M. de Saint-Chamans has accurately seen the analogy, let us go further, the identity existing between imports and machines. This is why he forbids them both; and truly, there is some pleasure in facing intrepid debaters who, even when they are wrong, take their line of reasoning to its limit.
But look at the difficulty in store for them!
While it is a priori true that the domains of invention and labor can expand only at the expense of one another, it is in those countries in which there are the most machines, for example, in Lancashire, that we ought to see the fewest workers. And if, on the contrary, we see in fact that machines and workers coexist to a greater degree in rich nations than in uncivilized ones, we have to conclude that these two forces are not mutually exclusive.
I cannot explain to myself how a thinking soul can have a moment’s rest when faced with this dilemma:
Either the inventions of man do not damage his labor, as the general facts demonstrate, since there are more of both among the English and French than among the Hurons and Cherokees, and, in this case, I have gone wrong, although I do not know either where or how I have gone astray. I would be committing treason against humanity if I introduced my mistake into the legislation of my country.
Or the discoveries of the human mind reduce manual labor, as certain facts appear to indicate, since every day I see a machine being substituted for twenty or one hundred workers, in which case I am obliged to identify a flagrant, eternal, and incurable antithesis between man’s intellectual and physical power, between his progress and his well-being. I cannot refrain
[print edition page 90]
from saying that the author of man was bound to give him the gift of either brain or brawn, either moral strength or brute force, and that in the event he has played a trick on him by conferring on him, simultaneously, mutually destructive powers.
This is a pressing difficulty. Well, do you know how to solve it? By this strange maxim:
In political economy, there are no absolute principles.
In common, intelligible parlance, this means:
“I do not know where truth or falsehood lies and am ignorant of what constitutes general good or evil. I do not let this trouble me. The immediate effect of each measure on my personal well-being is the sole law I agree to acknowledge.”
There are no principles! This is as though you were saying: “There are no facts, for principles are only formulae that sum up an entire order of well-known facts.”
Machines and imports certainly have effects. These effects are either good or bad. People can have differing opinions in this respect. But whichever one you adopt is formulated using one of these two principles: machines are good or machines are bad. Imports are advantageous or imports are harmful. But to say there are no principles is certainly the lowest degree of humiliation to which the human mind can descend, and I admit that I blush for my country when I hear such a monstrous heresy enunciated before the French Chambers with their assent, that is to say, before and with the assent of the elite of our fellow citizens, and all this to justify themselves for imposing on us laws in total ignorance.
But in the end, I will be told, destroy the sophism. Prove that machines do not damage human labor and that imports do not damage domestic labor.
In an essay of the present kind, such proofs could not be very detailed. My aim is rather to establish the difficulties than to solve them and to arouse reflection rather than to satisfy it. No convictions are ever firmly anchored in the human mind other than those that result from its own work. I will nevertheless endeavor to set it along this path.
What misleads the opponents of imports and machines is that they judge them by their immediate and transitory effects instead of going to their general and definitive consequences.3
[print edition page 91]
The immediate effect of an ingenious machine is to render a certain amount of manual labor superfluous for a given result. However, its action does not in the slightest stop there. For the very reason that this given result is achieved with less effort, it is made available to the public at a lower price, and the sum of the savings thus realized by all purchasers enables them to satisfy other wants, that is to say, to encourage manual labor in general by precisely the amount saved by those manual laborers working in the recently improved industry. In short, the level of work has not decreased, although that of satisfaction has been increased.
Let us use an example to make this set of effects clearer.
Let us imagine that 10 million hats costing 15 francs are consumed in France. This provides the hat industry with a turnover of 150 million. A machine is invented that enables the hats to be sold at 10 francs. The turnover for this industry is reduced to 100 million, assuming that consumption does not increase. However, the 50 million is not lost to human labor for all that. Having been saved by the purchasers of hats, it will be used to satisfy other needs and consequently to remunerate the entire industrial system by the same figure. With the 5 francs he has saved, Jean will buy a pair of shoes, Jacques a book, Jérôme an item of furniture, etc. The human labor, taken as a whole, will thus continue to be encouraged up to a level of 150 million; this sum will provide the same number of hats as before, plus all the other satisfactions corresponding to the 50 million that the machine will have saved. These satisfactions are the net product that France would have gained from the invention. This is a free gift, a tribute that man’s genius has imposed on nature. We do not deny that, during the transformation, a certain mass of labor will have been displaced, but we cannot agree that it has been destroyed or even diminished.
This is also true for imports. Let us return to the hypothesis.
France manufactured 10 million hats at a cost price of 15 francs. Foreigners invaded our market, supplying us with hats at 10 francs. I say that domestic labor will not be decreased in the slightest.
For it will have to produce up to 100 million to pay for 10 million hats at 10 francs.
And then each purchaser will have 5 francs left that he has saved on each hat, or a total of 50 million that he will pay for other pleasures, that is to say, for other things produced by labor.
Therefore the total amount of labor will remain the same as it was and the additional pleasures, representing the 50 million saved on the hats, will be the net profit from the imports or from free trade.
[print edition page 92]
And people must not try to terrify us with the picture of the suffering that, according to this reasoning, will accompany the displacement of labor.
For if protectionism had never occurred, labor would have rearranged itself in line with the laws of trade and no displacement would have taken place.
If, on the other hand, protectionism has led to an artificial and unproductive structure of labor, it would be this, and not freedom, that is responsible for