việc làm. (Đúng, những thay đổi đột ngột về thuế quan, hoặc lên hoặc xuống, có thể tạo ra thất nghiệp tạm thời, là lực lượng thay đổi tương ứng trong cơ cấu sản xuất như thay đổi đột ngột thậm chí có thể gây ra trầm cảm.) Tuy nhiên, thuế quan không phải là | 82 ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON employment. True sudden changes in the tariff either upward or downward can create temporary unemployment as they force corresponding changes in the structure of production. Such sudden changes can even cause a depression. But a tariff is not irrelevant to the question of wages. In the long run it always reduces real wages because it reduces efficiency production and wealth. Thus all the chief tariff fallacies stem from the central fallacy with which this book is concerned. They are the result of looking only at the immediate effects of a single tariff rate on one group of producers and forgetting the long-run effects both on consumers as a whole and on all other producers. I hear some reader asking Why not solve this by giving tariff protection to all producers But the fallacy here is that this cannot help producers uniformly and cannot help at all domestic producers who already outsell foreign producers these efficient producers must necessarily suffer from the diversion of purchasing power brought about by the tariff. 6 On the subject of the tariff we must keep in mind one final precaution. It is the same precaution that we found necessary in examining the effects of machinery. It is useless to deny that a tariff does benefit or at least can benefit special interests. True it benefits them at the expense of everyone else. But it does benefit them. If one industry alone could get protection while its owners and who s protected by tariffs 83 workers enjoyed the benefits of free trade in everything else they bought that industry would benefit even on net balance. As an attempt is made to extend the tariff blessings however even people in the protected industries both as producers and consumers begin to suffer from other people s protection and may finally be worse off even on net balance than if neither they nor anybody else had protection. But we should not deny as enthusiastic free traders have so often done the possibility of these .
