Published as book or pamphlet: ES1 1st French edition 1846.
There is something that confuses me, and it is this:
Sincere political writers studying the economy of societies from the sole point of view of the producer have reached the following two policies:
“Governments ought to make the consumers who are subject to their laws favour national industry.”
“They ought to make foreign consumers subject to their laws in order to make them favour national industry.”
The first of these policies is called Protectionism, the second is called opening up foreign markets.
Both of them are based on the fundamental idea known as the balance of trade:
“A people grows poorer when it imports and wealthier when it exports.”
For if any purchase from abroad is tribute paid out and a loss, it is very simple to restrict and even prohibit imports.
And if any sale abroad is tribute received and a profit, it is only natural to create markets for yourself, even through force.
Protectionist systems, colonial systems: these are therefore just two aspects of the same theory. Preventing our fellow citizens from purchasing from foreigners and forcing foreigners to purchase from our fellow citizens are just two consequences of an identical principle.
Well, it is impossible not to recognize that, according to this doctrine, if it is true, general interest is based on monopoly, or internal plunder, and on conquest, or external plunder.
I enter one of the chalets clinging to the slopes of our Pyrénées.
The head of the household has received only a meager wage for his work. A glacial wind makes his scantily clad children shiver, the fire is out and the table empty. There is wool, wood, and corn the other side of the mountain but these goods are forbidden to the family of the poor journeyman, as the other side of the mountains is no longer France. Foreign pine will not cheer the chalet’s fireplace, the shepherd’s children will not learn the taste of Basque bread,[1] and Navarre wool will not warm their frozen limbs. If this is what the general interest wants: fine! But let us agree that in this instance it is contrary to justice.
To command consumers by law, to force them to buy only in the national market, is to infringe on their freedom and to forbid them an activity, trade, that is in no way intrinsically immoral; in a word, it is to do them an injustice.
And yet it is necessary, people say, if we do not want national production to halt, if we do not want to deal a deathblow to public prosperity.
Writers of the protectionist school therefore reach the sorry conclusion that there is radical incompatibility between Justice and the Public Interest.
On the other hand, if every nation is interested in selling and not purchasing, a violent action and reaction will be the natural state of their mutual dealings, for each will seek to impose its products on everyone and everyone will endeavor to reject the products of everyone else.
A sale, in effect, implies a purchase, and since, according to this doctrine, selling is making a profit just as purchasing is making a loss, every international transaction implies the improvement of one nation and the deterioration of another.
On the one hand, however, men are inexorably drawn to whatever brings them a profit, while on the other they instinctively resist anything that harms them, which leads to the conclusion that every nation carries within itself a natural impulsion to expansion and a no less natural impulsion to resistance, both of which are equally harmful to everybody else, or in other words, antagonism and war are the natural condition of the human race.
Thus, the theory I am discussing can be summarized by these two axioms:
Public Interest is incompatible with Justice within the country.
Public Interest is incompatible with Peace abroad.
Well then! What astonishes and disconcerts me is that a political writer or a statesman, who has sincerely adopted an economic doctrine whose basic ideas are so violently contrary to other incontrovertible principles can have even one instant of calm and peace of mind.
For my part, I think that, if I had gone into science through this particular door, if I had not clearly perceived that Freedom, Public Interest, Justice and Peace are things that are not only compatible but closely linked with each other and, so to say, identical, I would endeavor to forget everything I had learnt and tell myself:
“How could God have wished men to achieve prosperity only through injustice and war? How could He have decreed that they should renounce war and injustice only by renouncing their well-being?
“Is the science that has led me to the horrible blasphemy implied by this alternative not misleading me with false flashes of insight, and do I dare to take it on myself to make it the basis for the legislation of a great nation? And when a long line of illustrious scholars has gathered more reassuring results from this same science, to which they have devoted their entire life, when they state that freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity; do they not have on their side the presumption that results from everything we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation? Am I casually to believe, faced with such beliefs and on the part of so many imposing authorities, that this same God took pleasure in instilling antagonism and discord in the laws governing the moral world? No, no, before holding as certain that all social principles conflict with each other, crash into and neutralize each other, and are locked in an anarchical, eternal, and irremediable struggle; before imposing on my fellow citizens the impious system to which my reasoning has led me, I wish to review the entire chain and reassure myself that there is no point on the route at which I have gone astray.”
If, after a sincere examination, redone twenty times, I continued to reach this frightful conclusion, that we have to choose between the Right and the Good,[2] I would reject science in my discouragement, I would sink into willful ignorance, and above all I would decline any participation in the affairs of my country, leaving men of another stamp the burden and responsibility of such a painful choice.[3]
Endnotes [Previous translation: 1st English ed. 1846, 1st American ed. 1848, FEE ed. 1964. See “Note on the Publishing History.”]
[1] Bastiat uses the term “la méture” which is a kind of corn bread and is a specialty of the Les Landes region where Bastiat grew up. It can also be made with pieces of ham known as “la méture au jambon.” Bastiat would have known well the Spanish provinces Biscay and Navarre on the other side of the border where he lived as he was fluent in Spanish and had once attempted to establish an insurance business in Spain. He may have witnessed personally the smuggling that took place across the border and might have known Béranger’s poem “The Smugglers” about smuggling on the Franco-Spanish border. Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780-1857) was a liberal poet and songwriter who rose to prominence during the Restoration period with his funny and clever criticisms of the monarchy and the church. He was sent to prison twice in the 1820s for offending the political authorities with his irreverent verses. Bastiat knew him and was known to have sung his drinking songs on occasion. See the glossary entry on “Béranger.”
[2] The phrase Bastiat uses is “le Bien et le Bon” which is difficult to translate. Given the context of what Bastiat is arguing, one might translate it as “the morally good and the materially good (or useful).”[3] (Paillottet’s note) See chapters XVIII, XX at the end of this volume [see this volume, “There Are No Absolute Principles” and “Human Labor, Domestic Labor”], and the letter to M. Thiers titled “Protectionism and Communism” (OC, vol. 4, p. 504, “Protectionisme et communisme”). [“Protectionism and Communism” also appears in The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat, in the volume titled “The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850, pp. 000–00.]
