Understanding Political Terminologies 3: Frédéric Bastiat on Mercantilism

Why is it very easy to sell political crap? Because all one needs is to broach information that caters to heuristics and emotionalism.

In the case of mercantilism or protectionism, the great Frédéric Bastiat wrote of how the public can easily be swayed by falsehoods,

We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.

This arises from the nature of things. Protection concentrates on one point the good which it produces, while the evils it inflicts are spread over the masses. The one is visible to the naked eye; the other only to the eye of the mind. In the case of liberty, it is just the reverse.

In the treatment of almost all economic questions we find it to be so.

You say: Here is a machine that has turned 30 workmen onto the street.

Or: Here is a spendthrift who encourages every branch of industry.

Or: The conquest of Algeria has doubled the trade of Marseilles.

Or: The budget secures subsistence for 100,000 families.

You are understood at once and by all. Your propositions are in themselves clear, simple, and true. What are your deductions from them?

Machinery is an evil.

Luxury, conquests, and heavy taxation are productive of good.

And your theory receives wide support in that you are in a situation to support it by reference to undoubted facts.

On our side, we must decline to confine our attention to the cause and its direct and immediate effect. We know that this very effect in its turn becomes a cause. To judge correctly of a measure, then, we must trace it through the whole chain of effects to its final result. In other words, we are forced to reason upon it.

To the unwitting public, if you tell lies that are big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

And that’s why even centuries after being debunked or being refuted by classical economics and by classical liberals, the spirit of mercantilism has remained politically popular.

This only exhibits that because many seem to have hardly been capable to think beyond their emotions, they become instruments for oppression, especially through the tyranny of mob-rule (democracy), by scheming politicians and their institutional followers.