Why! Does England suffer because it pays less tariffs on coffee, sugar, wheat and cotton? This is here a really strange paradox.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 193 to 198 (in French)
Libre-échange, November 14th, 1847

This address reviews some of the protectionist arguments and opposes them. One of the weirdest argument of the time was made in assessing economic difficulties in England at the time and to attribute them immediately to free-trade that had just been implemented then. It is the fallacious concept of confusing correlation and causation. However, it would have been necessary to try and show the causation link, which was not done in general.

This then allowed Bastiat to knock down the arguments of his opponents in a single sentence, as he is doing with today’s quote, showing how absurd the reasoning is. He then supports his argument by showing that those who suffer the most from the economic difficulties (the English workers), have well understood that this is not because of the repeal of tariffs.