The Liquor Industry

³⁷ It is said that:

• workers lose when they buy from a liquor store
• likewise, a manufacturing country loses when they buy wines from a wine country

I answer that the trade with the liquor store is not necessarily a losing trade.

• It is just as advantageous as any other, though it is abused more often.

The employment of a brewer and a liquor retailer are as necessary divisions of labour as any other.

• It is generally better for a worker to buy liquor from the brewer than to brew it himself.
• If he is a poor worker, he can buy it from the retailer in small amounts instead of from the brewer in large amounts.

All these trades should be free even though this freedom may be abused in all of them.

Individuals might sometimes ruin their fortunes by drinking too much liquor. But there is no risk that a nation should do so.

In every country, many people spend more on liquors than they can afford.

• But there are always more who spend less.

The cheapness of wine seems to be a cause of sobriety and not of drunkenness.

• The people of the wine countries are generally the soberest people in Europe.
• This is proven by the:
  • Spaniards
  • Italians
  • the people of southern France.

On the contrary, drunkenness is a common vice in countries:

• which produce no grapes due to excessive heat or cold
• where wine is dear

Drunkenness is common in the northern and tropical nations, such as the coast of Guinea.

Wine is much cheaper in southern France than in northern France.

• When a French regiment from the north goes to the south, the soldiers become debauched by the cheapness of good wine.
• After a few months, most of them become as sober as the rest of the people.

If the duties on foreign wines and the excises on malt, beer, and ale were removed all at once, it might create a temporary drunkenness among the middle and lower class people in Great Britain.

• It would probably be soon followed by a permanent and almost universal sobriety.

Presently, drunkenness is not the vice of the upper class.

The restraints on Great Britain’s wine trade favour Portuguese wine and discourage French wine.

It is said that the Portuguese are better customers for our manufactures than the French.

• Our manufactures should therefore prefer the Portuguese.

The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims.

• Only the most underling tradesmen make it a rule to chiefly employ their own customers.
• A great trader buys his goods always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.

³⁸ By those maxims, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbours.

Each nation has been made to:

• look invidiously on the prosperity of all the nations it trades with
• consider the gain of other nations as its own loss

Commerce, which should naturally be a bond of union and friendship among nations, as among individuals, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity.

During the past and present centuries, the capricious ambition of kings and ministers was not more fatal to European peace than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers.

“The violence and injustice of the rulers of mankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy.”

Merchants and manufacturers are not, and should not be, the rulers of mankind.

• Their mean rapacity and monopolizing spirit perhaps cannot be corrected.
• But they can be very easily prevented from disturbing the peace of others.

³⁹ Without a doubt, it was the spirit of monopoly which originally invented and propagated this doctrine.

Those who first taught it were by no means such fools as those who believed it.

In every country, it is always the people’s interest to buy whatever they want the cheapest.

• This proposition is so very manifest that it is ridiculous to take any pains to prove it.
• It could never have been questioned had not the sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind.
  • Their interest is directly opposite of the people’s interest.

It is the interest of the freemen of a corporation to hinder the rest of the people from employing any workers but themselves.

So it is the interest of the merchants and manufacturers of every country to secure to themselves the monopoly of the home market.

Hence:

• there are extraordinary duties on almost all goods imported by foreign merchants in Great Britain and most European countries
• the high duties and prohibitions on all those foreign manufactures which can compete with our own
• the extraordinary restraints on imports from countries with which the balance of trade is supposed to be disadvantageous

⁴⁰ The wealth of a neighbouring nation is dangerous in war and politics.

It is certainly advantageous in trade.

In war, it may enable our enemies to maintain superior fleets and armies.

• But in peace, it may enable them to exchange to a greater value with us.
• It may afford a better market for:
  • our produce, or
  • whatever is bought with our produce

A rich man is likely to be a better customer to industrious people than a poor man.

It is likewise with a rich nation.

A rich manufacturer is a very dangerous neighbour to all the other manufacturers in the neighbourhood.

However, the rest of the neighbourhood profits from the good market the rich manufacturer affords them.

They even profit by his underselling the poorer manufacturers.

In the same way, the manufacturers of a rich nation may be very dangerous rivals to their neighbour’s manufacturers.

This competition, however, is advantageous to the people.

• They profit greatly by the good market which that nation affords them.

Private people who want to make a fortune never think of retiring to remote and poor provinces.

They retire to the capital or to some great commercial town.

They know that where little wealth circulates, there is little to be got.

But where much wealth is in motion, some share of may fall to them.

In this way, the same maxims which would direct the common sense of 1 to 20 individuals, should regulate the judgement of 1 to 20 million people.

It should make a nation see the riches of its neighbours as a probable cause for itself to acquire riches.

A nation will likely enrich itself through foreign trade when its neighbours are all rich, industrious, and commercial nations.

A nation surrounded by wandering, poor savages might acquire riches by cultivating its own lands and by its interior commerce, but not by foreign trade.

This is how ancient Egypt and modern China acquired their great wealth.

• The ancient Egyptians neglected foreign commerce.
• The modern Chinese hold foreign commerce in the utmost contempt.
  • They rarely give it protection through its laws.

The modern maxims of foreign commerce aim at the impoverishment of all our neighbours.

Those maxims render that commerce insignificant and contemptible, instead of producing their intended effect.