Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat
page 50 of 212 (23%)
stimulated, and it will reduce the rate of wages. This is what you see.

But what you do not see is this. You do not see that to dismiss a
hundred thousand soldiers is not to do away with a million of money, but
to return it to the tax-payers. You do not see that to throw a hundred
thousand workers on the market, is to throw into it, at the same moment,
the hundred millions of money needed to pay for their labour: that,
consequently, the same act which increases the supply of hands,
increases also the demand; from which it follows, that your fear of a
reduction of wages is unfounded. You do not see that, before the
disbanding as well as after it, there are in the country a hundred
millions of money corresponding with the hundred thousand men. That the
whole difference consists in this: before the disbanding, the country
gave the hundred millions to the hundred thousand men for doing nothing;
and that after it, it pays them the same sum for working. You do not
see, in short, that when a tax-payer gives his money either to a soldier
in exchange for nothing, or to a worker in exchange for something, all
the ultimate consequences of the circulation of this money are the same
in the two cases; only, in the second case the tax-payer receives
something, in the former he receives nothing. The result is--a dead loss
to the nation.

The sophism which I am here combating will not stand the test of
progression, which is the touchstone of principles. If, when every
compensation is made, and all interests satisfied, there is a _national
profit_ in increasing the army, why not enrol under its banners the
entire male population of the country?



DigitalOcean Referral Badge