| Show TO THINK OVER Our protectionist contemporary innocently inno-cently assures the public that the object of the McKiXLEr bill is partly to secure the revenue needed by the government and partly to make this nation selfsupporting nation independent of the world Touching the first object we may remark that without any McKiNLxr bill the taxes collected by the government had exceeded the necessary expenses of the government over one hundred million dollars in a single sin-gle year The McKINLEY bill is entitled A Bill to Reduce the Revenues Republicans Re-publicans estimated that it would reduce the revenue of the government about 50 000000 a year and one of them said in the House that the reduction would be so great as to prevent the payment of the pensions Further no one objects at all to so much of taxation on imports as is necessary to raise money for the expenses of the government This talk about the McKiXLEr bill being merely a revenue measure is intended to distract attention from the real nature and intent of the new law As to tho second point that the bill is intended in-tended to make this country selfsupport ing what does the organ mean by that Does it object to being supported by others if they are willing Why should any man object to other people supporting him 1 But is there any danger that other people peo-ple will support usl Do we not have to support ourselves whether we trade with others or not J The Tribune is afraid that other people will work for us free of chargec and support us It is afraid foreigners will give us something for nothing and is horrified at the idea of our people receiving goods from foreigners who refuse to take any pay for them The organ seems to think that Europeans have entered into a conspiracy to offer us goods for nothing It pretends not to know that foreigners will not let us have their goods unless we let them have ours Every dollars worth of goods that come in means that we have sent out a dollars worth of our goods in i payment for them We receive no goods that our own labor has not earned When we send sewing machines to London and finally receive coffee from Rio Janeiro in f payment for them we have earned the coffee we have produced it just as truly as if we had culti rated the earth and grown it here instead in-stead of making sewing machines and exchanging them for the coffee But it would take ten times as much capital and labor to raise the amount of coffee on our soil that we get for one sewing machine and if we refuse to take the coffee the English will have to work harder for sewing sew-ing machines the Brazilians will work harder for English cutlery and we shall work ten times harder or longer for the same amount of Rio coffee we before received re-ceived for a sewing machine This is what protectionists mean when they say they want to furnish more work for our own people by compelling them to produce directly di-rectly all they consume instead of obtaining ob-taining some things by exchange with other countries This does furnish more work but it doesnt furnish more pay This makes us independent of other nations na-tions by compelling us to work longer to accomplish the same result as before Our coffee would cost us ten times more wo should have to work ten days then for tho some amount of coffee that we get now for one days work we should have more work to be sure and less pay in proportion propor-tion If the object is to make our people work more no better scheme could be devised de-vised than to compel them to make with their own hands everything they consume The way we supply our wants at present is by making such things as we can make easily and cheaply with as small an expenditure ex-penditure of labor and capital as possible Our rich broad country furnishes many opportunities for the enrichment of ourselves our-selves and the product of one days labor in America is exchanged for the product of two days labor ing Europe A bushel cf wheat costing one days labor here is exchanged ex-changed for a piece of cloth that would cost two days labor if made here The cheaper the foriegner will work for us the more we shall make by hiring him for we always pay him in the products of our own labor and in nothing else Wo export each year 700000000 worth of our goods the products of our labor and import each year S700COO000 worth of foreign goods the products of foreign labor and the latter is worth much more in our country coun-try than in Europe where the above price is set on it BASTIAT tells of the petition of the French manufacturers of candles wax lights rhandeliers reflectors snuffers extinguishers = ex-tinguishers and of tho producers of tallow tal-low oil resin alcohol and generally of everything used for lights They represented repre-sented to the Chamber of Deputies that they were subjected to the intolerable competition com-petition of a foreign rival who enjoyed it would seem such superior facilities facili-ties for the production of light that ho was enabled to inundate tho national market exceedingly reduced a price that the moment he made his appearance ap-pearance he drew off all custom from them and thus an important branch of French industry with all its innumerable ramifications ramifica-tions was suddenly reduced to a state of complete stagnation This rival who was no other than the sun carried on so bitter a war against them that they had every reason to believe that he had been excited to this course by their perfidious neighbor England Their petition was that the Chamber should pass a law ordering the shutting shut-ting up of all windows dormers skylights shutters curtains vasistas in a word all openings holes chinks and fissures through which the light of the sun might penetrate dwellings to the prejudicial competition of manufacturers of artificial light They showed how the lightmaking industry in-dustry would be stimulated by such a law how many men would be given employment employ-ment how much tallow would be consumed con-sumed with the corresponding increase of the cattle and sheep industry they demonstrated demon-strated the increase of olivo growing of beekeeping of navigation of every industry indus-try in fact by the demand for labor that aiustfollow the enactment of the law This was the most consistent protectionist protection-ist demand that could have been made for hero was a rival that worked for nothing a veritable pauper whose goods undersold everything else in the market and tho talk of the protectionists today Regarding pauper labor national indopendence and a selfsupporting country is not a whit less ridiculous in principle than the capital story told by BASTBAT I I |
