An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its PerpetuationVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation
Veblen, Thorstein
Peace; World War, 1914-1918 -- Peace
Plainly, any dynastic statesman who should undertake to further the
common welfare regardless of its serviceability for warlike enterprise
would be defeating his own purpose. He would, in effect, go near to
living up to his habitual professions touching international peace,
instead of professing to live up to them, as the exigencies of his
national enterprise now conventionally require him to do. In effect, he
would be _functus officio_.
There are two great administrative instruments available for this work
of repression and national self-sufficiency at the hands of the
imperialistic statesman: the protective tariff, and commercial
subvention. The two are not consistently to be distinguished from one
another at all points, and each runs out into a multifarious convolution
of variegated details; but the principles involved are, after all,
fairly neat and consistent. The former is of the nature of a conspiracy
in restraint of trade by repression; the latter, a conspiracy to the
like effect by subsidised monopoly; both alike act to check the pursuit
of industry in given lines by artificially increasing the cost of
production for given individuals or classes of producers, and both alike
impose a more than proportionate cost on the community within which they
take effect. Incidentally, both of these methods of inhibition bring a
degree, though a less degree, of hardship, to the rest of the industrial
world.
All this is matter of course to all economic students, and it should,
reasonably, be plain to all intelligent persons; but its voluble denial
by interested parties, as well as the easy credulity with which
patriotic citizens allow themselves to accept the sophistries offered in
defense of these measures of inhibition, has made it seem worth while
here to recall these commonplaces of economic science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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