#98. Protection and Free Trade.# Almost every government has employed taxation at one time or another, for the purpose of encouraging industry within the country. It is often supposed that if purchasers are prevented from buying foreign goods, they will have to buy home-made goods, and thus manufacturers at home will be kept busy, and there will be plenty of employment. This is altogether a fallacy, which we may call the #fallacy of Protection#, but it is one which readily takes hold of people's minds. No tradesman or manufacturer likes to see himself underbid by those who offer better goods at lower prices. When foreign goods, then, are preferred by purchasers, the home manufacturers of such goods complain bitterly, and join together to persuade people that they are being injured by foreign trade. There is still so much national pride and animosity, that a nation does not like to be told that it is being beaten by foreigners. The manufacturers, misled by their own self-interest, use all kinds of bad arguments to show that if foreign products were kept out of the country, they could make as good ones in a little time, and then they could employ many people, and add to the wealth of the country. They fall, in fact, into #the fallacy of making work# before described (section 55), and argue as if the purpose of work was to work, and not to enjoy abundant supplies of the necessaries and comforts of life. Now it is impossible to deny that certain owners of lands and mines and works may be benefited by putting duties upon foreign goods of the kind which they want to produce. Those who are already enjoying the advantage of such improper duties may, of course, be injured when they are removed. But what we have in political economy to look to, is not the selfish interests of any particular class of people, but the good of the whole population. Protectionists overlook two facts--(1) that the object of industry is to make goods abundant and cheap; (2) that it is impossible to import cheap foreign goods without exporting home-made goods of some sort to pay for them.