Premises Of Free Trade Examined Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from The Premises of Free Trade Examined As the text-books from which political economy is taught in most of our colleges are generally by English authors, or by Americans who have adopted the English views, it is not surprising that we should meet with a great many highly educated men who believe the trans-Atlantic ideas to be invulnerable. They have been taught that economical phenomena are too complex to be investigated by the a posteriori method, and that nothing can be relied on but reasoning from assumptions; and they have accepted with delight certain most attractive argumentations, in which the wasteful futility of protection appears to be demonstrated, just as the mathematician demonstrates that the three angles of a triangle are in all cases equal to two right angles. But deductive reasoning has its own liability to error. Very eminent authors may change the subject or change the premises or reason from an apparent axiom, which upon careful examination is found little better than a blunder, or an identical proposition. The writer believes that all these logical faults are to be found in the supposed demonstrations above alluded to ; and he proposes in this paper to point out a few of them, in the hope that some able minds may be led to review their conclusions, and to read or read again, with a candid spirit, what has been urged by Rae, Phillips. Carey, List, Bowen, Seaman, Thompson, Greeley, E. P. Smith, Kelly, Elder, and many others who have written in favor of protection. Let us first examine Mr. J. R. McCulIoch's apparent demonstration that absenteeism is not financially injurious to a country. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.