as if Don Boudreaux on April 30, 2023
in Business
… taken from page 161 of the 1880 Sixth American reprint of the 1971 Augustus M. Kelly. Edition of Say Jean-BaptisteIn the year In 1803 A treatise on political economy (Traité d’économie politics)::
No one should expect, the benefit of home production almost counterbalances the problem of paying dearly for each article; Our own capital and labor are engaged in production, and the profits we get into the pockets of our own citizens; My answer is that we must buy the value of the domestic product that gives equal employment opportunities to industry and capital so that the foreign products we import do not have gratis. For we must never forget from this high estimation that the products are always bought with products. The use of our effective power is not to be benefited by foreign superior branches, but by our own superiority. And with the product to buy others. Just as a man wants to make his own coat and shoes, the opposite approach would be just as foolish. What would the world say if an import duty were imposed on coats and shoes at every door, with the admirable purpose of forcing the prisoners to work for themselves? Do men say that, in justice, we should each follow his own desires, and buy what we want with what we produce, or the same thing that comes, with what we get for our produce? The system will be exactly the same, only taken to a ridiculous extreme.
DBX: Indeed.
The following fact cannot be proclaimed too often: Conservation is to economics what Lysenkoism is to biology. They are accepted only by the ignorant, the ideologically narrow, the unhealing minded, or the greedy rent-seeker.
