Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/22

tionist industries, consciously concerned to secure the high profits which tariff protection may enable them to take, by charging high prices to home consumers. But the fear, lest they should be unable otherwise to get a market large and reliable enough to take all their output, is an operative motive among most business classes, disposing them to the support of a protective tariff, while it is the main staple in all popular appeals to the electorate. In Great Britain, where the protectionist interests are not strong enough to win by their own weight, the only hope of tariff reformers is to stampede the electorate by fears of unemployment due to failure of a market. During a world depression, with unemployment in most industrial countries, the protectionist's claim that, by keeping out foreign goods, he can shift some of his own country's unemployment on to other countries, is not only plausible, but on a short view valid.^[1]

This short-range expediency from the standpoint of immediate employment cannot, indeed, be pressed into a general support for the protectionist position. For, in the modern world, the economic interests of members of different nations are so intricately interwoven that the increased unemployment of another country—e.g. Belgium—must, in the long run, be as injurious to us as unemployment among our own people. For, though not immediately of such serious concern, its injury will come home to us in loss of foreign purchasing power for our goods, as well as in the dearer price we pay at home for the goods we