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| Frederic Bastiat |
Sophisms includes his most famous essay on the fallacy of protectionism, the petition "From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Candlesticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from the Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected With Lighting". This reductio ad absurdum is in the form of a petition of said good folks to the Members of the Chamber of Deputies to draw their attention to an unfair foreign competitor "who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease." This competitor is none other than the sun.
The petition contains all the buzzwords of protectionism. But because of its absurdity, serves to underscore the absurdity of protectionism.
Bastiat lays the groundwork for the book in the first essay on abundance and scarcity. The whole basis of protectionism is the labour theory of value - the idea that value is determined by the work that goes into making something, not in the item itself. This, he avers, is nonsense.
And when it comes to goods, abundance is better than scarcity. Plenty is to be preferred to privation. Protectionism, he argues, favours a narrow group of people, producers, at the expense of consumers.
Everyone lives in society in two capacities, as producer and as consumer. And these two aspects of our lives are in conflict. As producers we want as high a price for what we produce as possible. As consumers we want to pay as low a price as possible. Ironically, our wishes as a producer are anti-social. We benefit if a competitor is hampered and items are scarce, thus raising prices for our products. But our wishes as a consumer are beneficial to society. As a consumer we wish for bountiful crops, improved methods of production and anything else that increases abundance. I elaborated on this in one of the first articles I wrote for this blog, The Consumer is King.
Even if the consumer had his fondest wish, that everything could be had for free, no one would be the poorer for it. When free trade allows us to get something for less than we would otherwise have to pay for it, we are, in fact, getting some of it for free. I elaborated on this in another essay, Bastiat and the Shmoo.
With this foundation, Bastiat sets out to skewer protectionists of all varieties.
Part of Bastiat's appeal is his wit and use of wry humour to make his point, as is evidenced by the candlemakers petition. Another brilliant example is his story of the negative railroad. A representative in the French government made the case for a break in the railroad from Paris to Spain at Bordeaux "for, if goods and passenger are forced to stop at that city, this will be profitable for boatmen, porters, owners of hotels, etc." Well, countered Bastiat, if one break in the tracks is good, why not have more? We can have a railroad composed of nothing but breaks in the tracks - a negative railroad!
Bastiat also includes a devastating and hilarious attack on the old bugaboo of balance of trade which I discussed here in An Unbalanced Idea.
Another gem is his fine essay, Something Else. It is often complained by protectionists that free trade may put some people out of work. What will these poor people do then? Bastiat uses the fictional character of Robinson Crusoe to make his point. I used his Crusoe analogy in a recent article attacking a current and long-standing piece of American protectionist legislation - the chicken tax.
Another gem is his fictional petition to the king to forbid people from using their right hands. After all, labour is wealth and if we have to work harder using our left hands, then think how much richer we will all be!
The book even has a section that discusses intellectual property - there ought not to be any.
But maybe the best essay in the book is a longer one that leads off the second part of the book, The Physiology of Plunder. Here is a solid argument for limited government, a government that respects the individual's right to live for himself at his own expense. But society is hampered, he argues, by "the constant endeavor of its members to live and prosper at one another's expense," the sorry state he calls plunder.
This is a fore-runner of his later monograph The Law, which is explicitly libertarian in its argument.
Bastiat is a gem and Economic Sophisms is well worth the read. It is surprising how germane his arguments remain for modern day libertarians.
Note: I had this little book sitting on my bookshelf for several decades, I had read bits and pieces of it over the years but never read it right through. I decided to do so when I started this blog and immediately found the first two essays worth blogging about. So I put it aside thinking I would read another bit whenever I wanted to blog on Bastiat again. That sort of fell to the back-burner. When I got started again, it spurred another essay and another. Finally I decided to just read it through and write about it later if it came in handy. Now I should go and read all the other partially finished books I have!
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