Economic Sophisms

Answers

• Q17LABOR

  Does introducing labor-saving machinery improve workers' lives?

  Yes. saved labour is gain. Labour is a means, not an end; any machine that saves an hour of work is progress, and suppressing machinery to create jobs is a sophism.

  To get at the root of this sophism, it is necessary only to reflect that human labour is not the _end_, but the _means. It never remains unemployed_. If one obstacle is removed, it does battle with another; and society is freed from two obstacles by the same amount of labour which was formerly, required for the removal of one. If the labour of the cooper is rendered unnecessary in one department, it will soon take another direction. But how and from what source will it be remunerated? From the same source exactly from which it is remunerated at present; for when a certain amount of labour becomes disposable by the removal of an obstacle, a corresponding amount of remuneration becomes disposable also.

  First Series, I. Abundance, Scarcity; II. Obstacle, Cause · Downloaded Gutenberg #44145 (Stirling translation); confirmed chapter titles and machinery passages in I and II.

• Q19LABOR

  Who should receive the benefits when machinery increases the amount a worker can produce?

  Consumers, through cheapness. Society's interest is the consumer's interest in abundance; labour saved by machines is freed for other wants, so the gain spreads through lower prices.

  What misleads the adversaries of machinery and foreign importations is, that they judge of them by their immediate and transitory effects, instead of following them out to their general and definitive consequences. The immediate effect of the invention and employment of an ingenious machine is to render superfluous, for the attainment of a given result, a certain amount of manual labour. But its action does not stop there. For the very reason that the desired result is obtained with fewer efforts, the product is handed over to the public at a lower price; and the aggregate of savings thus realized by all purchasers, enables them to procure other satisfactions; that is to say, to encourage manual labour in general to exactly the extent of the manual labour which has been saved in the special branch of industry which has been recently improved. So that the level of labour has not fallen, while that of enjoyments has risen.

  First Series, I. Abundance, Scarcity · Downloaded Gutenberg #44145; confirmed Chapter I text on consumer interest and saved labour.