chapter five: On the General Effect of Prohibitions - Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments [1815]
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Principles of Politics Applicable to a all Governments, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe, ed. Etienne Hofmann, Introduction by Nicholas Capaldi (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).
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chapter five
On the General Effect of Prohibitions
Prohibitions in the matter of industry and commerce, like all other prohibitions and more than all the others, put individuals at odds with the government. They form one nursery [300] for men preparing for every kind of crime by accustoming themselves to violate the laws, and another for men familiarizing themselves with wickedness, by living off the misfortune of their fellows. Not only do commercial prohibitions create artificial crimes, but they encourage the committing of these crimes by the profit which they attach to the fraud which is successful in deceiving them. This is a drawback on top of those which other prohibitive laws have. They tend to be traps for the poor, that class already surrounded by irresistible temptations, of which it has rightly been said that all its actions are hasty, because want presses on it, its poverty robs it of any enlightenment, and obscurity frees it from the force of opinion.
I said at the start of Book XII that I did not place the same importance on freedom of production as on other types of freedom. Nevertheless, the restrictions obtaining here involve laws so cruel that all others feel their effects. Look at the riots in Portugal occasioned first by the privileged position of the Company of Wines, riots requiring barbarous punishments, whose spectacle discouraged commerce, riots leading finally to a succession of constraints and cruelties which brought a host of proprietors to tear up their vines themselves, destroying in their despair the source of their riches, so that these would no longer furnish a pretext for all kinds of harassment. Look at the severity in England, the violence and the despotic acts which the exclusive privileges of the East India Company entail to keep themselves going. Open up the statutes of this otherwise humane and liberal nation. There you will see the death penalty multiply for actions impossible to consider criminal. When we examine the history of English settlements in North America, we see, so to speak, every special privilege followed by the emigration of the nonprivileged. The colonists fled in the face of [301] commercial restrictions, leaving lands they had scarcely finished clearing, to regain their freedom in the forest, asking from a savage nature a refuge from the persecutions of society.
If the system of prohibitions has not destroyed all the enterprise of the nations it harasses and torments, this is, as Smith remarks, because each individual’s natural effort to improve his lot is a repairing principle, which in many respects remedies the bad effects of administrative regulation, just as the life force struggles, often successfully, in the physical organization of man, against the illnesses which flow from his passions, intemperance, or laziness.
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