"A Negative Railroad"
Frederic Bastiat, yet again, demonstrates the absurdity of protectionism.
Similar to his reductio ad absurdum in “The Candlemakers’ Petition,” Bastiat decribes the economic absurdity of supporting domestic producers’ demands for stops along a hypothetical railroad from Paris to Spain.
[I]f Bordeaux has a right to profit from a break in the tracks, and if this profit is consistent with the public interest, then Angoulême, Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, and, in fact, all the intermediate points, including Ruffec, Châtellerault, etc., etc., ought also to demand breaks in the tracks, on the ground of the general interest—in the interest, that is, of domestic industry—for the more there are of these breaks in the line, the greater will be the amount paid for storage, porters, and cartage at every point along the way. By this means, we shall end by having a railroad composed of a whole series of breaks in the tracks, i.e., a negative railroad.
While the negative railroad would technically create jobs, these jobs would be completely unproductive ones. All the labor that would go into goods and services valued by consumers in a free market is instead allocated to a labor-intensive task valued by no-one. A government could likewise create millions of jobs instantly by mandating the construction of a million sand castles. Clearly, such a jobs program would not be create wealth but dissipate finite time, energy, effort, and capital—think of all the plastic shovels the sand-castle-builders would need!—on an activity valued at approximately nil by all consumers. The negative railroad, just like all other regulation-capture schemes, is a rent-seeking program that temporarily benefits its recipients while destroying wealth and retarding real economic growth.
The example of the negative railroad is perhaps made even more persuasive when one recalls that Bastiat was not a Parisian or Spaniard, but a resident of a small town in southern France; Bastiat was lived in the rural town of Bayonne which, to this day, boasts not even fifty thousand inhabitants, and lived the rest of his life in the even more desolate town of Mugron, with only fifteen thousand residents.
Bastiat concludes “A Negative Railroad” by succinctly and persuasively expanding the metaphor to conclude that protectionism is always and everywhere inimical to the economic interests of the consumer, i.e., everyone in society: “it is impossible to avoid running counter to the general interest, because the demand of the producer as such is only for efforts, wants, and obstacles.”
I encourage the reader to read the entirety of Bastiat’s short essay on the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org.