CHAPTER VI: CONCLUSIONS - Yves Guyot, The Comedy of Protection [1906]
Edition used:
The Comedy of Protection, trans. M.A. Hamilton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906).
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CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS
The German Government, entering in 1789 on a policy of Protection, created a hotbed of Social Democracy in the developing industrial centres. In entering in 1902 on an agrarian policy it strengthened the Socialists by providing them with new arguments; by encouraging the formation of Cartels it went a long way to justify Karl Marx’s theory of the concentration of Capital. When the Prussian Government bought mines and took shares in the Potassium Salt Syndicate and the Tube Syndicate it put in practice Marx’s theory of Collectivism, which it is part of its political creed to deny. Cartels are the active negation of freedom of labour facing every independent manufacturer with the Inquisition’s formula, “Compelle intrare.”
Price is the barometer of economics, indicating dearth or abundance. Protection attempts to check the fluctuations of the market; Cartels so falsify them that every one under their influence, whether as manager or victim, is far away from the truth. The German system of National Economy, directed to the development of national labour by the organisation of Cartels and bounties on export, ended by encouraging foreign labour and arousing competition not only in foreign markets, but even in the home market. Every export bounty is a present made at the expense of the country that gives it, just as every Customs duty is a private tax. A factitious increase in exports reduces a country to bankruptcy. It is the condition described in Article 585, paragraph 3, of the Commercial Code—“buying to sell at a lower price.”
BOOK IX
CUSTOMS STATISTICS—THE BALANCE OF TRADE, AND THE BALANCE OF INDEBTEDNESS
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