On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million
human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts
did not flow into this great metropolis. It staggers the imagination
to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass
through its gates tomorrow, if its inhabitants are to be preserved
from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage. And yet all are
sleeping peacefully at this moment, without being disturbed for a
single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect. On the other
hand, eighty departments have worked today, without co-operative
planning or mutual arrangements, to keep Paris supplied.
How does each succeeding day manage to bring to this gigantic market
just what is necessary?neither too much nor too little? What, then, is
the resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity
of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such
implicit faith, although his prosperity and his very life depend upon
it? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free
exchange. We put our faith in that inner light which Providence has
placed in the hearts of all men, and to which has been entrusted the
preservation and the unlimited improvement of our species, a light we
term self-interest, which is so illuminating, so constant, and so
penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance.
Where would you be, inhabitants of Paris, if some cabinet minister
decided to substitute for that power contrivances of his own
invention, however superior we might suppose them to be; if he
proposed to subject this prodigious mechanism to his supreme
direction, to take control of all of it into his own hands, to
determine by whom, where, how, and under what conditions everything
should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed? Although
there may be much suffering within your walls, although misery,
despair, and perhaps starvation, cause more tears to flow than your
warm-hearted charity can wipe away, it is probable, I dare say it is
certain, that the arbitrary intervention of the government would
infinitely multiply this suffering and spread among all of you the
ills that now affect only a small number of your fellow-citizens.
-Fr?d?ric Bastiat, 1801-1850