it happens, this assertion is also false. Families, communes, cantons, départements, and provinces are so many groups which all, without exception, reject in practice your principle and have never even given it a thought. All of these obtain by means of exchange what would cost them more to obtain by production. Every nation would do likewise if you did not prevent it by force.
It is therefore we who are the men of practice and experience, for in order to combat the prohibition that you have specially placed on some international trade, we base ourselves on the practice and experience of every individual and every group of individuals whose acts are voluntary and thus can be quoted as evidence. You, however, begin by coercing and preventing and then you seize upon acts that are forced or prohibited to claim: “You see, practice justifies us!”
You rise up against our theory and even against theory in general. But when you posit a principle that is antagonistic to ours, did you ever by chance imagine that you were not indulging in theory? No, no, cross that out of your papers. You are indulging in theory, just like us, but between yours and ours there is this difference:
[print edition page 74]
Our theory consists only in observing universal facts, universal sentiments, universal calculations and procedures, and at the very most classifying them and coordinating them in order to understand them better.
It is so little opposed to practice that it is nothing other than practice explained. We watch the actions of men driven by the instinct of self-preservation and progress and what they do freely and voluntarily; it is exactly this that we call political economy or the economics of society. We constantly repeat that each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or trading depending on whether there is more to gain from trading or producing. Each one through experience teaches himself this science, or rather, science is merely this same experience scrupulously observed and methodically set out.
You, however, make theory in the disparaging meaning of the word. You imagine and invent procedures that are not sanctioned by the practice of any living man under the heavens and then you call coercion and prohibition to your assistance. You have indeed to resort to force since, as you want men to produce what it is more advantageous to purchase, you want them to abandon an advantage and you require them to act in accordance with a doctrine that implies a contradiction even on its own terms.
Thus, I challenge you to extend, even in theory, this doctrine that you admit would be absurd in individual relationships, to transactions between families, communes, départements, or provinces. On your own admission, it is applicable only to international relations.
And this is why you are reduced to repeating each day:
“Principles are never absolute. What is good in individuals, families, communes, and provinces is bad in nations. What is good on a small scale, that is to say, purchasing rather than producing when a purchase is more advantageous than production, is the very thing that is bad on a large scale; the political economy of individuals is not that of peoples,” and more nonsense ejusdem farinae.6
And what is the reason for all this? Look closer. To prove to us that we the consumers are your property! That we belong to you, body and soul! That you have an exclusive right over our stomachs and limbs! That it is up to you to feed us and clothe us at a price set by you whatever your incompetence, rapacity, or the inferiority of your situation!
[print edition page 75]
No, you are not men of practice; you are men of abstraction … and of extortion.
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: “Conflit de principes.”
Place and date of first publication: No date given. First published in book form.
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. 86–90.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
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 favor national industry.”
“They ought to make foreign consumers subject to their laws in order to make them favor 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
[print edition page 76]
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 on the other side of the mountains, 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
[print edition page 77]
natural