Interference With Foreign Trade: A Supplementary Chapter to Elements of Political Economy (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Interference With Foreign Trade: A Supplementary Chapter to Elements of Political Economy

This is in fact the service contemplated in the argument above mentioned - that Protection enables capital to be invested at home. It is invested at home in businesses confessedly too weak to live without it. We are told that, even if they be weak, they are carried on in this country to the encouragement of trade in their whole neighbourhood, whereas capital invested abroad gives three-fourths of its benefits to the foreign place where it is invested. The case is again analogous to the case of machinery. To use the power-loom in place of the hand-loom is to do in an hour what might have employed many men for days. But to do it by hand-loom is to do it in a needlessly costly manner, and therefore to waste labour. Instead of creating abundance among our people, we might give work and wages, and profits and rent, to a very few in a corner of the kingdom, at the cost of all the rest of the population. Imports are a discouragement not of labour but of useless labour. If instead of making an article we import it, we are not dis pensed from making the equivalent in which to pay for it; but the labour of making the equiva lent is on the assumptions a less costly labour and therefore better for all concerned.

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