In Economic Sophisms, Bastiat tears the protectionist arguments to pieces and makes a powerful case for freedom of trade. In particular, he exposes the widespread jobs fallacy that pervades so much of the popular press and political discourse.
The jobs fallacy is the belief that job creation promotes prosperity. It just seems obvious that more jobs means more prosperity: more jobs means more income. Politicians are constantly clamoring about job creation. But there’s a subtle error here. Bastiat points out the absurdity of this argument.
Labor is a means to the end of consuming goods. The means is not the end, and all value derives from the end. Labor itself does not make us prosper—the results of labor are what we consider prosperity. Labor itself impoverishes us—it is costly: at the very least we lose leisure time. We only engage in labor because we expect the products of labor to enrich us more than the labor impoverishes us. What we’re after is to make a profit—a surplus of enrichment over impoverishment. We want to maximize the ratio of product to labor, of output to input, of result to effort. Keep reading...
Despite incredible advances in knowledge and technology over the past few decades, 