What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Éconimiques" Designed for the American Reader by Frédéric Bastiat
page 59 of 142 (41%)
page 59 of 142 (41%)
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at large of $52,800,000, Mr. Greeley, with his contracted views, only
regards it as a dead loss on the import side of our Commerce and Navigation Returns. R, was a bank which had a defaulting cashier, who ran away in 1857 with $500,000 of its funds. (Sch*yl*r carried off a million of New Haven Railroad bonds). These funds were recovered and converted into gold, which was shipped to the United States. According to Mr. Greeley, who could find no record of exports to counterbalance it, the same was a dead loss to the country. S, and his friends own 76,990 tons of whaling ships (see Commerce and Navigation Reports, 1866), worth $40 per ton, gold, or $3,079,600. These ships are sent annually to the Arctic regions and earn for S and his friends ten per cent., or $307,960 net profit each year. Five years' profits, consisting of whale oil, bone, etc., which, after an active and profitable trade at the Sandwich Islands, they returned with this year, were valued at $1,655,659, and were duly entered among the imports, furnishing to Mr. Greeley an indubitable proof that the country was losing money in this business, and that the attention of Congress should at once be directed toward supplying a proper remedy. T, was a South American refugee, who brought with him a million of dollars in gold doubloons. After living here for many years, by which time, through foreign trading, his capital had doubled, he invested the entire avails in United States bonds, as a last and striking evidence of his faith in our institutions, and departed to his native country, there to rest his bones. This man clearly prospered, and so did the country in which he settled, and on whose national faith he lent all his fortune. Yet Mr. Greeley concludes the whole thing to |
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