XV. – THE FREE TRADER’S LITTLE ARSENAL.

All injustice is of benefit to someone […]; to defend injustice on the grounds of the inconvenience that its abolition will cause the person who benefits from it, is to say that an injustice should be eternal for the sole reason that it has existed for an instant.

Frédéric Bastiat
Economic Sophisms Second Series

This “sophism” is a litany of sophisms from the time to which Bastiat answers one by one, in one short sentence each.

I am excerpting the conclusion of these because it is unfortunately a very contemporaneous issue. How many political decisions are not made in order to avoid the inconvenience to those who benefit from an injustice (one remembers the campaign from François Mitterrand who promised “not to touch on the existing benefits”)? How many political decisions are being made that are creating an injustice of which it will be difficult to get rid (one thinks about the tariffs implemented by Donald Trump and that will not be suppressed without non competitive companies suffer, or at least their employees who will need to be dismissed)?

Worse still, one can see here and there some intractable geopolitical situations where some piece of land “belongs” to two different people – the sufferings of 20th century decolonisation have not taught anything and the wizards keep on creating injustice that cannot be eternal, despite all they want us to believe.

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