According to the ideas which this Economist sets forth with such naïveté, there are many methods, and very simple methods too, of obliging men to create what he terms the wealth of value.
The first is to deprive them of what they have. “If taxation [p186] lays held of money where it is plentiful, to distribute it where it is scarce, it is useful, and far from being a loss, it is a gain, to the state.”[43]
The second is to dissipate what you take. “Luxury and prodigality, which are so hurtful to individual fortunes, benefit public wealth. You teach me a fine moral lesson, it may be said—I have no such pretension—my business is with Political Economy, and not with morals. You seek the means of rendering nations richer, and I preach up luxury.”[44]
A more prompt method still is to destroy the wealth which you take from the tax-payer by good sweeping wars. “If you grant me that the expenditure of prodigals is as productive as any other, and that the expenditure of governments is equally productive, . . . you will no longer be astonished at the wealth of England after so expensive a war.”[45]
But, as tending to promote the creation of this Wealth of value, all these means—taxes, luxury, wars—must hide their diminished heads before an expedient infinitely more efficacious—namely, conflagration.
“To build is a great source of wealth, because it supplies revenues to proprietors, who furnish the materials, to workmen, and to divers classes of artisans and artists. Melon cites Sir William Petty, who regards, as a national profit, the labour employed in rebuilding the streets of London after the great fire which consumed two-thirds of the city, and he estimates it (the profit!) at a million sterling per annum (in money of 1666) during four years, and this without the least injury having been done to other branches of trade. Without regarding this pecuniary estimate of profit as quite accurate,” adds M. de Saint-Chamans, “it is certain at least that this event had no detrimental effect upon the wealth of England at that period. . . . The result stated by Sir W. Petty is not impossible, seeing that the necessity of rebuilding London must have created a large amount of new revenues.”[46]
All Economists, who set out by confounding wealth with value, must infallibly arrive at the same conclusions, if they are logical; but they are not logical; for on the road of absurdity men of any common sense always sooner or later stop short. M. de Saint-Chamans seems himself to recede a little before the consequences of his principle, when it lands him in a eulogium on conflagration. We see that he hesitates, and contents himself with a negative panegyric. He should have carried out his principle to [p187] its logical conclusions, and told us roundly what he so clearly indicates.
Of all our Economists, M. de Sismondi has succumbed to the difficulty now under consideration in the manner most to be regretted. Like M. de Saint-Chamans, he set out with the idea that value forms an element of wealth; and, like him, he has built upon this datum a Political Economy à rebours, denouncing everything which tends to diminish value. Sismondi, like Saint-Chamans, exalts obstacles, proscribes machinery, anathematizes exchange, competition, and liberty, extols luxury and taxation, and arrives at length at this conclusion, that the more we possess the poorer we become.[47]
From beginning to end of his work, however, M. de Sismondi seems to have a lurking consciousness that he is mistaken, and that a dark veil may have interposed itself between his mind and the truth. He does not venture, like M. de Saint-Chamans, to announce roughly and bluntly the consequences of his principle—he hesitates, and is troubled. He asks himself sometimes if it is possible that all men from the beginning of the world have been in error, and on the road to self-destruction, in seeking to diminish the proportion which Effort bears to Satisfaction,—that is to say, value. At once the friend and the enemy of liberty, he fears it, since the abundance which depreciates value leads to universal poverty, and yet he knows not how to set about the destruction of this fatal liberty. He thus arrives at the confines of socialism and artificial organization, and insinuates that government and science should regulate and control everything. Then he sees the danger of the advice he is giving, retracts it, and ends by falling into despair, exclaiming—“Liberty leads to the abyss of poverty—Constraint is as impossible as it is useless—there is no escape.” In truth and reality, there is none, if Value be Riches; in other words, if the obstacle to prosperity be prosperity itself,—that is to say, if Evil be Good.
The latest writer, as far as I know, who has stirred this question [p188] is M. Proudhon. It made the fortune of his book, Des Contradictions Économiques. Never was there a finer opportunity of seizing a paradox by the forelock, and snapping his fingers at science. Never was there a fairer occasion of asking—“Do you see in the increase of value a good or an evil? Quidquid dixeris argumentabor.” Just think what a treat![48]