If you allow it, you confess at once that your end is to injure the people as much as possible. If you do not allow it, then you deny your power to diminish the supply, to raise the price, and consequently you deny having favored the producer.
You are either injurious or inefficient. You can never be useful.
II.
OBSTACLE—CAUSE.
The obstacle mistaken for the cause—scarcity mistaken for abundance. The sophism is the same. It is well to study it under every aspect.
Man naturally is in a state of entire destitution.
Between this state and the satisfying of his wants, there exists a multitude of obstacles which it is the object of labor to surmount. It is interesting to seek how and why he could have been led to look even upon these obstacles to his happiness as the cause of it.
I wish to take a journey of some hundred miles. But, between the point of my departure and my destination, there are interposed, mountains, rivers, swamps, forests, robbers—in a word, obstacles; and to conquer these obstacles, it is necessary that I should bestow much labor and great efforts in opposing them;—or, what is the same thing, if others do it for me, I must pay them the value of their exertions. It is evident that I should have been better off had these obstacles never existed.
Through the journey of life, in the long series of days from the cradle to the tomb, man has many difficulties to oppose him in his progress. Hunger, thirst, sickness, heat, cold, are so many obstacles scattered along his road. In a state of isolation, he would be obliged to combat them all by hunting, fishing, agriculture, spinning, weaving, architecture, etc., and it is very evident that it would be better for him that these difficulties should exist to a less degree, or even not at all. In a state of society he is not obliged, personally, to struggle with each of these obstacles, but others do it for him; and he, in return, must remove some one of them for the benefit of his fellow-men.