148. We have taken the protectionist's own definition of a protective duty, and have found that such a duty, instead of increasing national wealth, must, at every step, and by every incident of its operation, waste labor and capital, lower the efficiency of the national industry, weaken the country in trade, and consequently lower the standard of comfort of the whole population. We have found that protected industries, according to the statement of the protectionists, do not produce, but consume. If then these industries are the ones which make us rich, consumption is production and destruction produces. The object of a protective duty is "to effect the diversion of a part of the capital and labor of the people out of the channels in which it would run otherwise, into channels favored or created by law" (§ 13). We have seen that the channels into which the labor and capital of the people are to be diverted are offered by the industries which do not pay. Hence protectionism is found to mean that national prosperity is to be produced by forcing labor and capital into employments where the capital cannot be reproduced with the same increase which could be won by it elsewhere. If that is so, then capital in those employments will be wasted, and the final outcome of our investigation, which must be made the primary maxim of the art of national prosperity under protectionism, is that Waste makes Wealth. Such is its outcome when regarded as an economic philosophy.
149. As regards the social and jural relations which are established between citizen and citizen, protectionism is proved by a half-dozen independent analyses of it to be simply a device for forcing us to levy tribute on each other. If the law brings a cent to A it must have taken it from B, or else it must have produced it out of nothing, that is, it must be magic. Every soul pays protective taxes. If, then, anybody gets anything from them, he needs to remember what they cost him, and he should insist on casting
