Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/158

economy of the world that the cheaper or more efficiently conducted business should get the job.

There is, of course, another consideration present to some of your minds which, for simplicity of argument, I have kept back for separate consideration. If the British railway has to pay appreciably more for Glasgow than for Belgian rails, its running costs and freight rates must be raised. This rise of freight might be so considerable as to cripple trade and so strike back at production and employment in the general industry of the country. Such general damage to employment through railway costs might more than outweigh the increased employment given to Glasgow railmakers. On the other hand, if the price difference between the Belgian and the Glasgow tenders were very small, the net result of preferring Glasgow might be a smaller amount of unemployment in this country and a larger in Belgium.

In other words, given a general depression and unemployment in the industrial world, a tariff might be used to distribute the aggregate volume of employment for the time being favourably to the political area which set it up. In the case adduced, a tariff keeping out Belgian rails might, if it did not raise considerably the price of British rails, cause more employment in this country. This judgment is, in reality, only an extension of the common admission that, if a special local trade could keep a special pull upon a tariff, so that its workers gained more as favoured producers than they lost as consumers, their plea for protection had rational validity. On a short perspective, it seems probable that during a general trade depression, a skilfully wielded tariff might shift part of the burden of unemployment on to other political areas. I need hardly add that no mortal tariff would be either skilful or honest enough to keep within the limits of the economy, watching the comparative costs of production in the various countries so closely as to prevent organised industries inside the tariff area from raising prices so high as to cause more unemployment than it cured.

I spoke just now of a short perspective. As a lasting policy such a defence of national employment could not succeed. There would emerge two inevitable causes of failure. The first is primarily political. As in the case of protection for infant industries (quite defensible on theoretic lines) the fatal objection is that such infants never grow up, so here the