“Give me your wine and I will give you twenty reels of yarn, for we English spin more cheaply than the Belgians.” However, a customs officer who happened to be there said, “My good man,
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trade with the Belgian if you like, but my job is to prevent you from trading with the Englishman.” “What!” said the farmer, “you want me to be content with fifteen reels of yarn from Brussels when I can have twenty from Manchester?” “Certainly, do you not see that France would be the loser if you received twenty reels instead of fifteen?” “I find it difficult to understand this,” said the wine producer. “And I to explain it,” went on the customs officer, “but this is a fact, for all the deputies, ministers, and journalists agree on this point, that the more a people receive in exchange for a given quantity of their products, the poorer they become.” He had to conclude the bargain with the Belgian. The farmer’s daughter had only three-quarters of her trousseau, and these honest people still ask themselves how it can be that you are ruined by receiving four instead of three and why you are richer with three dozen napkins than with four dozen.
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: “Immense découverte!!!”
Place and date of first publication: JDE 12 (October 1845): 208–11.
First French edition as book or pamphlet: Economic Sophisms (First Series) (1846).
Location in Paillottet’s edition of OC: Vol. 4. Sophismes économiques. Petits pamphlets I, pp. 63–67.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
At a time when all minds are occupied with searching for savings on various means of transport;
At a time when, in order to achieve these savings, we are leveling roads, canalizing rivers, improving steamships, and linking all our frontiers to Paris by an iron network, by traction systems that are atmospheric, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, etc.;1
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Finally, at a time when I simply have to believe that everyone is enthusiastically and sincerely seeking the solution to the following problem:
“To ensure that the price of things at their place of consumption is as close as possible to their price at their place of production.”
I would feel guilty toward my country, my century, and myself if I kept secret any longer the marvelous discovery I have just made.
For while the inventor’s illusions may well be legendary, I am as certain as I can be that I have found an infallible means that ensures that products from around the world reach France and vice versa with a considerable reduction in their prices.
Infallible! This is just one of the advantages of my astonishing invention.
It requires neither a drawing, an estimate, nor preliminary studies, nor any engineers, machine operators, entrepreneurs, capital, shareholders, nor help from the government!
It offers no risk of shipwreck, explosion, shocks, fire, or derailment!
It can be put into practice in less than a day!
Lastly, and this will doubtless recommend it to the public, it will not cost the budget one centime, far from it. It will not increase the numbers of civil servants and the requirements of bureaucracy, far from it. It will not cost anyone his freedom, far from it.
It is not by chance that I have come about my discovery; it is through observation. I have to tell you now what led me to it.
This in fact was the question I had to solve:
“Why does something made in Brussels, for example, cost more when it reaches Paris?”
Well, it did not take me long to see that this is a result of the fact that there are several types of obstacles between Paris and Brussels. First of all, there is distance; we cannot cover this without a certain difficulty and loss of time, and we either have to subject ourselves to this or pay someone else to. Next come the rivers, the marshes, the lay of the land, and the mud; these are so many difficulties to be overcome. We do this by constructing roadways, building bridges, cutting roads, and reducing their resistance through the use
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of cobbles, iron bands, etc. But all this has a cost, and the object being carried must bear its share of these costs. There are also thieves on the roads, which necessitates a gendarmerie, a police force, etc.
Well, among these obstacles, there is one that we have set up ourselves, and at great expense, between Brussels and Paris. This is the men lying in ambush all along the frontier, armed to the teeth and responsible for placing difficulties in the way of the transport of goods from one country to the other. We call them customs officers. They act in exactly the same way as mud or ruts in the road. They delay, hinder, and contribute to the difference we have noted between the cost of production and the consumer price, a difference which it is our problem to decrease as far as possible.
And now we have solved the problem. Reduce tariffs.
You will have built the Northern railway line without it having cost you a penny. Furthermore, you will save heavy expenditure and you will begin to put capital in your pocket right from the first day.
Really, I ask myself how it was possible for enough strange ideas to have gotten into our heads that we were persuaded to pay many millions with a view to destroying the natural obstacles lying between France and foreign countries and at the same time to pay many other millions to substitute artificial obstacles for them which have exactly the same effect, so that the obstacles created counteract those destroyed, things go on as before and the result of the operation is double expenditure.
A Belgian product worth 20 fr. in Brussels fetches 30 when it reaches Paris, because of transport costs. A similar product of Parisian manufacture costs 40 fr. So what do we do about it?
First, we put a duty of at least 10 fr. on the Belgian product in order to raise its cost price in Paris to 40 fr., and we pay a host of supervisors to ensure that it does not escape this duty, with the result that during the journey 10 fr. is charged for transport and 10 fr. for tax.
Having done this, we reason thus: transport from Brussels to Paris, which costs 10 fr., is very expensive. Let us spend two or three hundred million on railways, and we will reduce it by half.2 Obviously, all that we will have obtained is that the Belgian product will be sold in Paris for 35 fr., that is to say:
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| 20 fr. | its price in Brussels |
| 10 fr. | duty |
| 5 fr. | reduced transport by rail |
| 35 fr. | total, or the cost price in Paris |
Well, would we not have achieved the same result by lowering the tariff to 5 fr.? We would then have:
| 20 fr. | its price in Brussels |
| 5 fr. | reduced duty |
| 10 fr. | transport by ordinary road |
| 35 fr. | total, or the cost price in Paris |
And this procedure would have saved us the 200 million that the railway costs, plus the cost of customs surveillance, since these are bound to decrease as the incentive to smuggle decreases.
But, people will say, the duty is necessary to protect Parisian industry. So be it, but then