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Propositions Concerning Protection and Free Trade
Propositions Concerning Protection and Free Trade Author:Willard Phillips 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: VIII. Free trade assumes as true at least eleven false propositions, each of which is essential to its support, and either of which not being true, the system fa... more »lls to pieces. It is surprising with what a complacent simplicity of unconscious self-conceit, many of the political, social, and economical thinkers of these times of ours, propose the total destruction and reconstruction of the whole social and industrial system of their own country, or of all Christendom. The St. Simonians, the Fourierites, the Communists, the Amazons, have less scruple and compunction in sweeping away at a dash the whole social system, than a young author in erasing his bad fine passages. The thorough-going theorist of free trade is of the same stamp. He proposes what is in the extremesfr degree theoretical, never having been practised in any civilized community excepting some small commercial places of trivial internal resources, and assumes in its support, as preliminary concessions, and essential and fundamental postulates, at least eleven palpably erroneous propositions. The original proposition that embodies his theory, viz. the let-alone dogma, assumes what is an impossibility, as applied to any community that is governed by law; since, as we have seen, legislation cannot let alone industry if it would. The demonstrator of that " science," then, assumes as part of his premises, that what each individual supposes to be most for his own private interest, is most advantageous to the public. He instructs us that, commerce being only an exchange of equivalents, the sole criterion for discrimination is that made by the trader, viz. the comparative money price at thetime, in the market; and, except this difference, one sort of import is as advantageous to the country as another. He rep...« less