Sophisms of the Protectionists
Bastiat wrote this book to destroy protectionist arguments not with dull repetition, but with lethal wit. In the famous candlemakers' petition, he imagines French candle manufacturers begging the government for protection from the Sun's unfair competition - a sun that floods the market with free light, making their candles unprofitable. The satire is devastating because it exposes how easily special interests dress up greed as patriotism. Each essay follows this pattern: take a protectionist argument seriously, follow it to its logical conclusion, and watch it collapse into absurdity. Bastiat shows that what sounds like defending national industry is often just a mask for private gain. His clarity comes from refusing to let fuzzy thinking pass as wisdom. The arguments feel fresh because the tensions between free trade and economic nationalism have never gone away. This is for anyone who wants to understand why tariffs and subsidies never quite deliver what they promise - and why the best economic writing survives its era.
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“Suppose two countries, A and B. A possesses over B all kinds of advantages. You infer from this, that every sort of industry will concentrate itself in A, and that B is powerless. A, you say, sells much more than it buys; B buys much more than it sells. I might dispute this, but I respect your hypothesis. On this hypothesis, labour is much in demand in A, and will soon rise in price there. Iron, coal, land, food, capital, are much in demand in A, and they will soon rise in price there. Contemporaneously with this, labour, iron, coal, land, food, capital, are in little request in B, and will soon fall in price there. Nor is this all. While A is always selling, and B is always buying, money passes from B to A. It becomes abundant in A, and scarce in B. But abundance of money means that we must have plenty of it to buy everything else. Then in A, to the real dearness which arises from a very active demand, there is added a nominal dearness, which is due to a redundancy of the precious metals. Scarcity””
— Frédéric Bastiat
“But if men are, on the one hand, irresistibly impelled towards what is for their profit, and if, on the other, they resist instinctively what is hurtful, we are forced to conclude that each nation carries in its bosom a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of resistance, which forces are equally injurious to all other nations; or, in other words, that antagonism and war are the natural state of human society.””
— Frédéric Bastiat
“man becomes rich in proportion to the remunerative nature of his labor;””
— Frédéric Bastiat
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Bastiat, Frédéric. Sophisms of the Protectionists. Lex, lex-books.com/book/sophisms-of-the-protectionists-1352d9e4-4902-4580-a370-df6a9625089e.Bastiat, F. (n.d.). Sophisms of the Protectionists. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sophisms-of-the-protectionists-1352d9e4-4902-4580-a370-df6a9625089eBastiat, Frédéric. Sophisms of the Protectionists. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/sophisms-of-the-protectionists-1352d9e4-4902-4580-a370-df6a9625089e.
