I have found in the book by M. de Saint-Chamans (page 210):6
“If 15 million francs worth of goods sold abroad is taken from normal production, estimated to be 50 million, the remaining 35 million worth can no longer meet normal demand and will increase in price and will reach a value of 50 million. Then the revenue of the country will be 15 million more.… There will therefore be an increase in wealth of 15 million for the country, exactly the amount of the cash which is imported.”
Is that not ridiculous! If during the year a nation makes 50 million francs’ worth of harvested products and goods, it just has to sell a quarter abroad
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to be a quarter richer! Therefore, if it sold half, it would increase its fortune by half, and if it trades for cash its last wisp of wool and last grain of wheat, it would raise its wealth to 100 million! Producing infinitely high prices through absolute scarcity is a very strange way of becoming wealthier!
Anyway, do you want to assess the merits of the two doctrines? Subject them to the exaggeration test.
According to the doctrine of M. de Saint-Chamans, the French would be just as rich, that is to say, as well provided with everything with a thousandth part of their annual output, since it would be worth a thousand times more.
According to ours, the French would be infinitely rich if their annual output was infinitely abundant and consequently was of no value at all.
12. Does Protection Increase the Rate of Pay?
PUBLISHING HISTORY:
Original title: “La protection élève-t-elle le taux des salaires?”
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. 74–79.
Previous translations: 1st English ed., 1846; 1st American ed., 1848; FEE ed., 1964.
An atheist was railing against religion, against priests, and against God. “If you continue,” said one of the audience, himself not very orthodox, “you are going to reconvert me.”
Thus, when we hear our beardless scribblers, romantic writers, reformers, rose-scented and musky writers of serials, gorged on ice cream and champagne, clutching in their portfolios shares of Ganneron, Nord, and Mackenzie1 or having their tirades against the egoism and individualism of the
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century heaped with gold; when we hear them, as I say, railing against the harshness of our institutions, wailing about the wage-earners and the proletariat;2 when we see them raise to the heavens eyes that mourn the sight of the destitution of the working classes, destitution that they never visit save to conjure up lucrative pictures of it, we are tempted to say to them: “If you continue in this way, you will make me indifferent to the fate of the workers.”
Oh, such affectation! This is the sickening disease of our time! Workers, if a serious man, a sincere philanthropist, reveals a picture of your distress or writes a book that makes an impression, a rabble of reformers immediately seizes this prey in its claws. It is turned one way and another, exploited, exaggerated, and squeezed to the point of disgust and ridicule. All that you are thrown by way of a remedy are the high-sounding words, organization and association. You are flattered and fawned upon, and soon workers will be reduced by this to the situation of slaves: responsible men will be ashamed to take up their cause publicly, for how will they be able to introduce a few sensible ideas in the midst of such bland protestations?
But I refuse to adopt this cowardly indifference that is not justified by the affectation that triggers it!
Workers, your situation is strange! You are being robbed, as I will shortly be proving … No, I withdraw that word. Let us banish from our discourse all violent and perhaps misleading expressions, seeing that plunder, clad in the sophisms that conceal it, is carried out, we are expected to believe, against the will of the plunderer and with the consent of those being plundered. But when all is said and done, you are being robbed of the just remuneration for your work and nobody is concerned with achieving justice for you. Oh! If all that was needed to console you were noisy calls for philanthropy, impotent charity, and degrading alms, and if high-sounding words like organization, communism, and phalanstery3 were enough, you would have your fill. But
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nobody thinks of ensuring that justice, simple justice, is rendered to you. And yet, would it not be just for you, when you have been paid your meager salary following a long and hard day’s work, to be able to exchange it for as many forms of satisfaction as you can obtain voluntarily from any man anywhere in the world?
One day, perhaps, I too will speak to you about association and organization, and we will then see what you can expect from these illusions that have led you down the garden path.4
In the meantime, let us see whether people are doing you an injustice when they pass laws which determine from whom you are permitted to buy the things you need, such as bread, meat, linen, and cloth, and, as it were, at what artificial price you will have to pay for them.
Is it true that protection, which, it is admitted, makes you to pay a high price for everything and thus causes you harm, raises your rate of pay proportionally?
On what do rates of pay depend?
One of your people has said this forcefully: “When two workers pursue an employer, earnings decrease; when two employers pursue one worker, they rise.”5
Allow me, in short, to use this statement, which is more scientific but may be less clear: “Rates of pay depend on the ratio of the supply of and the demand for labor.”
Well, on what does the supply of labor depend?
On the number in the marketplace, and on this initial element, protection has no effect.
On what does the demand for labor depend?
On the national capital available. But has the law that says: “We will no longer receive such and such a product from abroad, we will manufacture
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it internally,” increased this capital? Not in the slightest. The law has withdrawn the product from one area to place it in another, but it has not increased the product by one obole. Therefore the law does not increase the demand for labor.
A factory is shown off with pride. Has it been established and maintained with capital from the moon? No, capital has had to be withdrawn either from agriculture, shipping, or the wine-producing industry. And this is why, while there are more workers in our mineshafts and in the suburbs of our manufacturing towns since protectionist duties became law, there are fewer sailors in our ports and fewer workers and wine producers in our fields and hills.
I could continue on this theme for a long time. I prefer to try to make you understand my thought with this example.
A farmer had twenty arpents of land,6 which he developed,
