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Collected Essays in Political and Social Science
Collected Essays in Political and Social Science Author:William Graham Sumner Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ARGUMENT AGAINST PROTECTIVE TAXES. THE most absurd assertion which can be put into language is that a thing (e.g., free trade) is true in theory but is fa... more »lse in practice. For, if free trade is not true in practice, something else, viz., restricted trade, is alleged to be true and beneficial in practice. It will therefore be a matter of scientific investigation to find out how restriction acts, what forces it brings into action, what are the laws of those forces, what are the conditions of successful restriction, etc. etc.—in short, to find out the theory and philosophy of restriction. The theory thus found will be " true" because deduced from observation and ratified by experience. But it was conceded, at the outset, that free trade is true in theory. Hence it would follow, if free trade is true in theory but not in practice, that two opposite and contradictory propositions about the same subject-matter could both be true at the same time. This is the height of absurdity. Any one, therefore, who makes this .assertion is either guilty of very loose thinking, or else he seeks an escape, at all hazards, from rational conclusions against which he can no longer contend. There remain two possible positions which a protectionist may assume: I. He may boldly declare that there is a science of wealth based on restriction; that he can discover the principles of it and reduce them to a theory; that trade between countries is a mischievous thing, at least if it runs on parallels of latitude; that isolation and antagonism of nations is the law of nature upon which wealth and civilization depend; that there is therefore no universal science of wealth, but only a national science of wealth, and that this science, in its final analysis, is only a generalization from certain empirical...« less