It pays the exporting country, England, to sell coal in Cadiz _at less
than its English economic value_, and to import the wine from Cadiz.
It pays your English owner of coal, although the values attaching to
it by the time it has got to Cadiz are £2 a ton, to sell a ton of coal
there for only £1, and to exchange that against the wine of Cadiz, and
bring that back to England. At first sight it sounds absurd to say that
selling thus at a lower value than the cost of production and transport
can possibly be profitable. But if you will look at it closely you
will see that it is so.
If the Englishman had tried to make his wine at home it would have cost
him £100 to make twenty dozen bottles, but when he has sold his coal
at Cadiz for £1 he can with that £1 buy twenty dozen of wine and bring
it back to England. He is much the wealthier by the transaction, and
so is the man at Cadiz. The Cadiz man could have spent his energies in
digging out a ton of coal near Cadiz instead of importing it, but the
same energies used in making wine produce enough wine to get him rather
more coal from England.
2. The second Formula to remember about Exchange is this: =Goods do not
directly exchange always one against the other, but usually in a much
more complicated way, by what may be called= _Multiple Exchange_.
Of course, the vehicle by which this is done is a currency, or _money_,
which I will explain in a moment; but the point to seize here is that
exchange is just as truly taking place when there is no direct barter
of two things but a much longer and complicated process.
For instance, a group of people called a Railway Company in the
Argentine want a locomotive. A locomotive can be produced cheaper and
better, that is, with less expenditure of energy for the result, in
England than in the Argentine. But on the other hand, England wants
to import tea. Now the Argentine grows no tea. What happens? How does
England get the tea? That locomotive goes out to the Argentine. An
amount of wheat sufficient to exchange against the locomotive goes
against it, _not_ to England, but to Holland, a country which, like us,
has to import a lot of wheat. As against the wheat sent to Holland,
the people in Holland send, say, the cheeses which they make so well,
on account of their special conditions, and the consignment goes to
Germany. The Germans send out a number of rails equivalent to the
number of cheeses and of the wheat and of the locomotive, as they are
very good at making rails, and have specialised on it. But they do not
send the rails to Holland. They send them to some Railway Company which
has asked for them in Egypt. The Egyptian people send out an equivalent
amount of cotton, which they can grow easily in their climate, and this
cotton goes to mills in India, and against it there comes an equivalent
amount of tea, but the tea does not go back to Egypt. It goes to
England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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