This result is inevitable.Abolish customs duties, and national industry suffers, as we have already seen in the case of sesame; maintain the duties without granting premiums for exportation, and national commerce will be beaten in foreign markets.To obviate this difficulty do you resort to premiums? You but restore with one hand what you have received with the other, and you provoke fraud, the last result, the caput mortuum, of all encouragements of industry.Hence it follows that every encouragement to labor, every reward bestowed upon industry, beyond the natural price of its product, is a gratuitous gift, a bribe taken out of the consumer and offered in his name to a favorite of power, in exchange for zero, for nothing.
To encourage industry, then, is synonymous at bottom with encouraging idleness:
it is one of the forms of swindling.
In the interest of our navy the government had thought it best to grant to outfitters of transport-ships a premium for every man employed on their vessels.Now, I continue to quote M.Reybaud:
On every vessel that starts for Newfoundland from sixty to seventy men embark.Of this number twelve are sailors: the balance consists of villagers snatched from their work in the fields, who, engaged as day laborers for the preparation of fish, remain strangers to the rigging, and have nothing that is marine about them except their feet and stomach.Nevertheless, these men figure on the rolls of the naval inscription, and there perpetuate a deception.When there is occasion to defend the institution of premiums, these are cited in its favor; they swell the numbers and contribute to success.
Base jugglery! doubtless some innocent reformer will exclaim.Be it so: but let us analyze the fact, and try to disengage the general idea to be found therein.
In principle the only encouragement to labor that science can admit is profit.For, if labor cannot find its reward in its own product, very far from encouraging it, it should be abandoned as soon as possible, and, if this same labor results in a net product, it is absurd to add to this net product a gratuitous gift, and thus overrate the value of the service.
Applying this principle, I say then: If the merchant service calls only for ten thousand sailors, it should not be asked to support fifteen thousand;
the shortest course for the government is to put five thousand conscripts on State vessels, and send them on their expeditions, like princes.Every encouragement offered to the merchant marine is a direct invitation to fraud, -- what do I say? -- a proposal to pay wages for an impossible service.
Do the handling and discipline of vessels and all the conditions of maritime commerce accommodate themselves to these adjuncts of a useless persononel?
What, then, can the ship-owner do in face of a government which offers him a bonus to embark on his vessel people of whom he has no need? If the ministry throws the money of the treasury into the street, am I guilty if I pick it up?
Thus -- and it is a point worthy of notice -- the theory of encouragements emanates directly from the theory of sacrifice; and, in order to avoid holding man responsible, the opponents of competition, by the fatal contradiction of their ideas, are obliged to make him now a god, now a brute.And then they are astonished that society is not moved by their appeal! Poor children!
men will never be better or worse than you see them now and than they always have been.As soon as their individual welfare solicits them, they desert the general welfare: in which I find them, if not honorable, at least worthy of excuse.It is your fault if you now demand of them more than they owe you and now stimulate their greed with rewards which they do not deserve.
Man has nothing more precious than himself, and consequently no other law than his responsibility.The theory of self-sacrifice, like that of rewards, is a theory of rogues, subversive of society and morality; and by the very fact that you look either to sacrifice or to privilege for the maintenance of order, you create a new antagonism in society.Instead of causing the birth of harmony from the free activity of persons, you render the individual and the State strangers to each other; in commanding union, you breathe discord.
To sum up, outside of competition there remains but this alternative, -- encouragement, which is a mystification, or sacrifice, which is hypocrisy.
Therefore competition, analyzed in its principle, is an inspiration of justice; and yet we shall see that competition, in its results, is unjust.
2.-- Subversive effects of competition, and the destruction of liberty thereby.
The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, says the Gospel, and the violent take it by force.These words are the allegory of society.In society regulated by labor, dignity, wealth, and glory are objects of competition; they are the reward of the strong, and competition may be defined as the regime of force.The old economists did not at first perceive this contradiction:
the moderns have been forced to recognize it.
"To elevate a State from the lowest degree of barbarism to the highest degree of opulence," wrote A.Smith, "but three things are necessary, --
peace, moderate taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.All the rest is brought about by the natural course of things."
On which the last translator of Smith, M.Blanqui, lets fall this gloomy comment:
We have seen the natural course of things produce disastrous effects, and create anarchy in production, war for markets, and piracy in competition.
