Freedom In Transactions; F. Bastiat

And yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed for·a single instant by the prospect of such. a frightful catastrophe. On the other hand, eighty departments have been laboring today, without concert, without any mutual understanding, for the provisioning of Paris. How does each succeeding day bring what is wanted, nothing more, nothing less, to so gigantic a market? What, then, is the ingenious and secret power which governs the astonishing regularity of move ments so complicated, a regularity in which everybody has implicit faith, although happiness and life itself are at stake? That power is an absolute principle, the prin ciple of freedom in transactions. We have faith in that [ 190] inward light which Providence has placed· in the heart of all men, and to which he has confided the preservation and indefinite amelioration of our species, namely, a regard to personal interest-since we must give it its right name-a principle so active, so vigilant, so fore seeing, when it is free in its action. In what situation, I would ask, would the inhabitants of Paris be if a minister should take it into his head to substitute for this power the combinations of his own genius, however superior we might suppose them to be-if he thought to subject to his supreme direction this prodigious mechanism, to hold the springs of it in his hands, to decide by whom, or in what manner, or on what conditions, everything needed should be produced, transported, exchanged, and con sumed? Truly, there may be much suffering within the walls of Paris-poverty, despair, perhaps starvation, causing more tears to How than ardent charity is able to dry up; but 1 affirm that it is probable, nay, that it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of government would multiply infinitely those sufferings, and spread over all our fellow citizens those evils which at present affect only a small number of them.

[ 191 ] ECONOMIC MYTHS OF EARLY CAPITALISM THERE is one supreme myth which more than any other has served to discredit the economic system to which we owe our present-day civilization. It is the legend of the deterioration of the position of the working classes in consequence of the rise of "capitalism" (or of the "manu facturing" or the "industrial system"). Who has not heard of the c;'horrorsof early capitalism" and gained the impression that the advent of this system brought untold new suffering to large classes who before were tolerably content and comfortable? We might justly hold in disrepute a system to which the blame attached that even for a time it worsened the position of the poor est and most numerous class of the population. The widespread emotional aversion to ,c;capitalism"is closely connected with this belief that the undeniable growth of wealth which the competitive order has produced was purchased at the price of depressing the standard of life of the weakest elements of society.