không liên quan đến câu hỏi tiền lương. Về lâu dài, nó luôn luôn làm giảm tiền lương thực tế, bởi vì nó làm giảm hiệu quả sử dụng, sản xuất và sự giàu có. Vì vậy, tất cả các sai lầm thuế quan trưởng xuất phát từ sai lầm của trung tâm mà cuốn sách này là có liên quan. | SAVING THE X INDUSTRY 105 which to buy other things. The result must be that other industries on the average must be smaller than otherwise in order that the X industry may be larger. But the result of this subsidy is not merely that there has been a transfer of wealth or income or that other industries have shrunk in the aggregate as much as the X industry has expanded. The result is also and this is where the net loss comes in to the nation considered as a unit that capital and labor are driven out of industries in which they are more efficiently employed to be diverted to an industry in which they are less efficiently employed. Less wealth is created. The average standard of living is lowered compared with what it would have been. 4 These results are virtually inherent in fact in the very arguments put forward to subsidize the X industry. The X industry is shrinking or dying by the contention of its friends. Why it may be asked should it be kept alive by artificial respiration The idea that an expanding economy implies that all industries must be simultaneously expanding is a profound error. In order that new industries may grow fast enough it is necessary that some old industries should be allowed to shrink or die. They must do this in order to release the necessary capital and labor for the new industries. If we had tried to keep the horse-and-buggy trade artificially alive we should have slowed down the growth of the automobile industry and all the trades de- io6 ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON pendent on it. We should have lowered the production of wealth and retarded economic and scientific progress. We do the same thing however when we try to prevent any industry from dying in order to protect the labor already teamed or the capital already invested in it. Paradoxical as it may seem to some it is just as necessary to the health of a dynamic economy that dying industries be allowed to die as that growing industries be allowed to grow. The first process is essential
