Economic Sophisms

by Frédéric Bastiat

Then I should strictly forbid any inquiry into the validity of my titles and pretensions. I should do more. As reason would be my most dangerous antagonist, I should forbid the use of reason itself, unless applied to this formidable subject. In the language of the savages, I should taboo this question and everything relating to it. To handle it, or even think of it, should be declared an unpardonable sin.

It would be the very triumph of my art to guard with a taboo barrier every intellectual avenue which could possibly lead to a discovery of my imposture; and what better security than to declare even doubt to be sacrilege?

And still to this fundamental security I should add others. For example, effectually to prevent enlightenment ever reaching the masses, I should appropriate to myself and my accomplices the monopoly of all knowledge, which I would conceal under the veil of a dead language and hieroglyphic characters; and in order that I should never be exposed to any danger, I would take care to establish an institution which would enable me, day after day, to penetrate the secrets of all consciences.

It would not be amiss that I should at the same time satisfy some of the real wants of my people, especially if, in doing so, I could increase my influence and authority. Thus, as men have great need of instruction, and of being taught morals, I should constitute myself the dispenser of these. By this means I should direct as I saw best the minds and hearts of my people. I should establish an indissoluble connexion between morals and my authority. I should represent them as incapable of existing, except in this state of union; so that, if some bold man were to attempt to stir a tabooed question, society at large, which could not dispense with moral teaching, would feel the earth tremble under its feet, and would turn with rage against this frantic innovator.

When things had come to this pass, it is obvious that the people would become my property in a stricter sense than if they were my slaves. The slave curses his chains—they would hug theirs; and I should thus succeed in imprinting the brand of servitude, not on their foreheads, but on their innermost consciences.

Public opinion alone can overturn such an edifice of iniquity; but where can it make a beginning, when every stone of the edifice is tabooed? It is obviously an affair of time and the printing-press.

God forbid that I should desire to shake the consoling religious convictions which connect this life of trial with a life of felicity. But that our irresistible religious aspirations have been abused, is what no one, not even the head of the Church himself, can deny. It appears to me that there is a sure test by which a people can discover whether they are duped or not. Examine Religion and the Priest, in order to discover whether the priest is the instrument of religion, or whether religion is not rather the instrument of the priest.

If the priest is the instrument of religion, if his sole care is to spread over the country morals and blessings, he will be gentle, tolerant, humble, charitable, full of zeal; his life will be a reflection of his Divine Model; he will preach liberty and equality among men, peace and fraternity between nations; he will repel the seductions of temporal power, desiring no alliance with what of all things in the world most requires to be kept in check; he will be a man of the people, a man of sound counsels, a man of consolation, a man of public opinion, a man of the Gospel.

If, on the contrary, religion is the instrument of the priest, he will treat it as we treat an instrument, which we alter, bend, and twist about in all directions, so as to make it available for the purpose we have in view. He will increase the number of questions which are tabooed; his morals will change with times, men, and circumstances. He will endeavour to impose upon people by gestures and studied attitudes; and will mumble a hundred times a day words, the meaning of which has evaporated, and which have come to be nothing better than a vain conventionalism. He will traffic in sacred things, but in such a way as not to shake men's faith in their sacredness; and he will take care, when he meets with acute, clear-sighted people, not to carry on this traffic so openly or actively as in other circumstances. He will mix himself up with worldly intrigues; and he will take the side of men in power, provided they embrace his side. In a word, in all his actions, we shall discover that his object is not to advance the cause of religion through the clergy, but the cause of the clergy through religion; and as so many efforts must have an object, and as this object, on our hypothesis, can be nothing else than wealth and power, the most incontestable sign of the people having been duped is that the priest has become rich and powerful.

It is quite evident that a true religion may be abused as well as a false religion. The more respectable its authority is, the more is it to be feared that the proofs of that respectability will be pressed too far. But the results will be widely different. Abuses have a tendency to excite the sound, enlightened, and independent portion of the population to rebellion. And it is a much more serious thing to shake public belief in a true than in a false religion.