Economic sanction

“ The economists accustomed to reverence everything which comes in the name and under the sanction of commerce, will see this new order spring up without alarm, and will consecrate their servile pens to the celebration of its praises. Its debut will be one of brilliant promise, but the result will be an industrial inquisition, subordinating the whole people to the interests of the affiliated monopolists. ”

“ The true sanction of private property, consists in its effect to stimulate men to industry, and the improvement of the understanding ; from the consideration that they will enjoy whatever their knowledge and industry may gain. Exactly the reverse of this sanction, and this effect, is the doctrine, that knowledge or industry will be excited and increased, by transferring a portion of their gains from themselves, to orders, hereditary, titled, hierarchical or stock. ”

“ The Government took to itself, by defence regulation, specific powers to requisition stocks of goods and materials, to pay manufacturers on the basis of cost and a fair profit, to license dealers, to enforce priorities of distribution, and in other ways to establish State control over trade. ”

“ Loan delinquency and the associated penalty interest rate, therefore, often bring about the reduction or elimination of bonus payments and, in extreme cases, the withholding of a portion of regular pay. Application of the more severe sanctions entails a serious deterioration of the economic organization's finances that adversely affects its production program. ”

“ We cannot turn the tables on these factories, by forcing them to give us money; on the contrary, their owners are empowered by law to force us to give them money. Our exportable commodities, which serve without pay, will be better soldiers abroad, in carrying on a commercial war with dissimilar foreign restrictions, if they retain a freedom of exchange, than an army of capitalists at home, created and paid for carrying on the same war. ”

“ It is one great organized lie invented by the rich to delude the poor. The Political Economists, though favourable to the rights of property in all else, questioned the tenure of land and undermined the old sanction that supported that right. This science has been a useful weapon against the landed proprietors, but it is useless against the capitalists. Its arguments are specious enough. It does not appeal to first principles, to ancient sanction as the landowners do. ”

“ Had the impulse thus given to industry, and the enormous domestic undertakings thus set on foot by the sanction and with the approbation of government, been cautiously sustained, as a similar impulse had been during the war, by a corresponding increase of the circulation, based on a footing which was not liable to be contracted by a failure of the harvest, or an enhanced demand for gold in foreign states, it might have been the commencement of an era of prosperity, and a general spread of happiness, unprecedented in British annals. ”

“ The policy of protecting duties to force manufacturing, is of the same nature, and will produce the same consequences as that of enriching a noble interest, a church interest, or a paper interest; because bounties to capital are taxes upon industry, and a distribution of property by law. And it is the worst mode of encouraging aristocracy, because, to the evil of distributing wealth at home by law, is to be added the national loss arising from foreign retaliation upon our own exports. ”

“ It has established the doctrine that the way to obtain large home supplies is to prevent the workings of sound economic law to further enlarging home production, and thus secure independence, and an average of low prices; whilst, at the same time, our foreign competitors, under the law of freedom, are gaining the power to still further control our markets. It has established that a power existing only for self-protection, can contrary to the Constitution, be turned into a power for the destruction of industries. ”

“ They have levied irregular and hurtful taxes without the consent of the people, and have restricted foreign trade to treaty ports. They have placed the likin embargo on merchandise, obstructed internal commerce, retarded the creation of industrial enterprises, rendered impossible the development of natural resources, denied a regular system of impartial administration of justice, and inflicted cruel punishment on persons charged with offences, whether innocent or guilty. ”

“ If any nation whatever has a right to shut up to our produce all the ports of the earth except her own and those of her friends, she may shut up these also, and so confine us within our own limits. No nation can subscribe to such pretensions; no nation can agree, at the mere will or interest of another, to have its peaceable industry suspended, and its citizens reduced to idleness and Want. The loss of our produce destined for foreign markets, or that loss which would result from an arbitrary restraint of our markets, is a tax too serious for us to acquiesce in. ”

“ How slowly it yields even to the most insistent demonstration of its inadequacy is shown by the attitude which the heads of the business world have adopted to the restrictions imposed on economic activity during the war. The control of railways, mines and shipping, the distribution of raw materials through a public department instead of through competing merchants, the regulation of prices, the attempts to check "profiteering"—the detailed application of these measures may have been effective or ineffective, wise or injudicious. ”

“ The experience of five or six revolutions between the liberty of free exchanges, and the coercions, accidental or legal, creating a necessity for household manufactures, have convinced me of their inefficacy for producing wealth, when uncombined with foreign commerce. We are not obliged to elect between foreign manufactures and household manufactures. Let all be free to individual preference; let our eagle-eyed people choose and abstain for themselves. They generally strive to make some surplus annually, and know how to effect it better than the government can inform them. ”

“ However, the indirect sanction of cutting one's goods off from the interstate market is one which can be applied to producers as we have defined them herein effectively and without injury to the public interest. ”

“ Evidently this is a point in the articulation of the modern economic system where a sufficiently ruthless outside authority, not actuated by a primary regard for the pecuniary interests of the employers, might conceivably with good effect enforce a more economical consumption of the country's man-power. ”

“ Is it nothing whether a system shall be sanctioned which confirms by one of its fundamental articles that general transfer of property from its ancient and lawful possessors, which holds out one of the most terrible examples of national injustice, and which has furnished the great source of revolutionary finance and revolutionary strength against all the Powers of Europe? ”

“ A strict responsibility on the part of all the agents of the Government should be maintained and peculation or defalcation visited with immediate expulsion from office and the most condign punishment.
The public interest also demands that if any war has existed between the Government and the currency it shall cease. Measures of a financial character now having the sanction of legal enactment shall be faithfully enforced until repealed by the legislative authority. But I owe it to myself to declare that I regard existing enactments as unwise and impolitic and in a high degree oppressive. ”

“ Their power to fix prices, to restrict production, to crush small independent traders, and to concentrate large power in the few to the detriment of the many, were but some of numerous evils ascribed to them. ”

“ Not to defend the life of the Republic against armed aggression, but to produce certain effects upon the business of the country. You not only admit that power of the National Government to change at will all current values in the country, to dispose of the private fortune of every citizen at its arbitrary pleasure—nay, in the face of the efforts of others to strip the Government of a discretion so despotic, you insist that that power shall be exercised by what you euphoniously call “making and keeping the currency equal to the wants of trade,” by the interference of Government. ”

“ All such grants relating to any known trade or manufacture have been held by all the judges of England, whenever they have come up for consideration, to be void at common law as destroying the freedom of trade, discouraging labor and industry, restraining persons from getting an honest livelihood, and putting it into the power of the grantees to enhance the price of commodities. ”

“ If a compulsion upon the colonies to purchase necessaries of Britain, was impoverishing to the purchasers; a compulsion upon States and occupations to purchase necessaries of capitalists, must be equally impoverishing on the purchasers. Are not cargoes of internal manufactures, attended by a prohibition against competition, equivalent to cargoes of tea and British commodities, forced upon the colonies without being attended by competition? ”

“ Indeed, between them they comprise all things which can be exchanged, and therefore, a policy which asserts that it is wise to destroy exchanges of agricultural products for manufactures, asserts also that it is wise to have no exchanges at all. If it is the interest of any foreign nation to take an agricultural surplus of us, because they want it, we must also pursue our interest in taking of any foreign nation its manufactured surplus, should we want it. Neither surplus would be of any value except for such exchanges. ”

“ I said, "and you have State capitalism. You won't abolish wages; you'll buy the mines and railways, and you'll draw your wages from what is left over after the interest due to the late shareholders is paid."
"Ah!" he interrupted, "you want to confiscate?"
"If necessary, certainly. We have conscripted life because the State required men to give their lives; why not conscript wealth in the same way? The State requires the wealth of the rich, not only for the purpose of paying for the war; it requires it to pay for the peace to come."
"Control of industry by producers has always failed," he said. ”

“ If the State can wrench the control of the prices of commodities from the hands of all the people exercising their inalienable right of pursuit through the means of free competition pursued at their free discretions, it is, of course, inevitably fixing the compensation for their services and labors. ”

“ What is quite certain is that the state will adopt different methods of acquiring control of industrial capital, but that none of them—unless a catastrophe were to be precipitated by the reaction—can be called confiscation with any justice. ”

“ The objection is, that the protecting-duty policy will injure or destroy commerce, meaning foreign commerce, and the Committee justify this consequence by asserting, that a domestick commerce between factories and raisers of raw materials will compensate us for the loss, because foreign commerce can present no preference over domestick. Foreign commerce is then condemned to death by this policy, leaving its partner, agriculture, as a legacy to capitalists. ”

“ Tariff laws make and destroy industries. Prohibition laws have annihilated industries, while legality, which is the peculiar product of parliaments, has everything to do with the ownership of property, of industry, and of the management of [263] capital. ”

“ To say nothing of the impolicy of our permitting the carrying trade and home market of such a country to pass out of our hands into those of a commercial rival, the Government, in the first place, would be certain to suffer most disastrously in its revenue by the introduction of a system of smuggling upon an extensive scale, which an army of custom-house officers could not prevent, and which would operate to affect injuriously the interests of all the industrial classes of this country. ”

“ Now the use of this Prohibition, supposing it practicable, is to serve as a sumptuary Law, and to binde the Nation in general not to spend more then they get; for if we could export no Commodity of our own growth or manufacture then by prohibiting the going out of Money, it is also ipso facto commanded that nothing forreign should be brought in. ”

“ Is the rule hereafter to be that human characteristics and methods, universally existing and applied, are all to become the basis for a charge of crime, and that the law, in attempting to reach that equality and fairness which constitute justice, is going to allow those wishing to buy commodities produced by others to beat down the prices, whilst those who have added to the world's supply are to defend their rights in bargaining by a threatened intervention by the State that may end in their ruin as well as their loss of liberty? ”

“ Sometimes the laws tend to make the whole nation poor. Such are the laws which force the industry of the people out of the natural channel, restricting commerce, agriculture, manufactures, industry in general. Sometimes this is done by promoting war, by keeping up armies and navies, by putting the destructive work of fighting, or the merely conservative work of ruling, before the creative works of productive industry. ”

“ Undoubtedly a properly worked-out solution of this question would have the tendency to check the unwarranted growth of prices that would appease the masses. The normal effect of a decree limiting profits is of tremendous importance, not only in that it would soften the feeling of ill-will towards the trade-industrial class, but also because it would afford the government a new, convincing proof that the commercial and industrial class is ready to make all possible sacrifices for the common good, a proof which would paralyze the voicing of any new demands on the part of the masses. ”