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Thoughts on the mechanism of societies

Chapter 31: On the Influence of the National Prices on the Sales in Foreign Markets.
By marquis de Charles Casaux
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EconomicsHistory - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)Philosophy & Ethics

About This Book

An extended political-economy essay examines national debt, taxation, and the economic forces that produce public wealth. After surveying the country's material improvement despite heavy borrowing, the author attributes growth to savings generated by agriculture and industry, contending these have doubled landed revenue and underpinned prosperity. He challenges conventional calls for large-scale reimbursement or hoarded reserves, arguing that reimbursement could be useless or harmful and that taxation, properly analyzed and apportioned, can serve public welfare. The work decomposes imposts, questions fiscal imperfections, and proposes pragmatic fiscal arrangements to secure interest payments while warning against cosmetic financial operations by ministers.

On the Influence of the National Prices on the Sales in Foreign Markets.

The impossibility of a competition in trade with those who can afford cheaper, in money, the articles which are to be the object of such a trade, is so affirmatively maintained, and this principle is so self-evident, when applied to two manufacturers in the same town, circumscribed in their selling as well as their buying, within the precincts of the same country, where the one should always procure for 3, what the other would have the stupidity to buy constantly at 4, that it becomes pardonable (if one carries the examination no farther) to admit of this idea, taken in a most comprehensive manner, as one of those trivial truths, which are not worth being searched into. But I must own, that my reflexions on the pretended necessity of keeping the commercial balance constantly in favour, have made me rather circumspect in giving credit to opinions the most generally received.

It will not be in regard to the situation of a country, which might allege a difference of 7 or 8 per cent. in its prices, as an insurmountable bar to competition, that I shall examine in what manner that very competition might be established; I shall suppose a nation in the 6th, 7th, and 8th hypotheses, wherein wheat is rated at 40s. per quarter, by a series of revolutions in the coin, or a multiplication of taxes, or by an increase in wealth; and I shall place it in opposition to another nation, considered as paying few or no taxes, and humbly consuming her wheat at the rate of 26 or 27s. the quarter.

In order to render the effects of the disproportion more sensible, I shall further suppose, that the shilling in both nations equally contains 86 grains of silver at the same standard.

Before these two nations be represented as vying with each other in the foreign markets, I shall, in the first instance, examine, whether it might not be possible to settle between them a direct trade, equally advantageous to both; for if this be practicable, why should not the competition be so likewise?—Is not the trade of each competitor a direct one with the nation, in which he vies?—And if, in this case, there be a sure and equitable principle for one of the competitors, why should it not be so for the other?