On 2017, media and schools are trying to induce that money is a goal, while it is only a means to obtain some wealth. So they try to pervert jobs. There are obviously jobs that are more perverse than others. At the same time, finance tell us that everyone should be honest except the stranger.
It is very difficult to describe scientifically the logic of our job. This tends to challenge us. I think my job as a computer scientist requires the purchase of computers. It’s because there are so many computer scientists in France that we are engaged in the digital world of importing computers from Asia to destroy our industries. The computer scientist is therefore a lawyer. But it’s not just him who does it. Here is an excerpt from the book "The Principles of Social Science" by Henry Charles Carey. The trafficker is, according to Henry Charles Carey, the one who buys cheap to sell expensive, according to the famous quality/price ratio. Here is the answer to this famous question: Why an empire ends up imploding?
"For those who live by the work of appropriation, the growth of commerce is not wanted, its development being everywhere accompanied by the fall of the brilliancy and magnificence of those whose wish to lead the movements of the Society with a view to their personal interest. The statesman profits from his isolation from his fellows, and so does the lawyer, the trafficker, the great owner of a poorly cultivated land, and all the other individuals. belonging to the classes, whose means of existence and distinction are due to their intervention, between those who produce the commodities and those who need them for their consumption. All these individuals collect a temporary profit, preventing growing movement in the society; and the greater their power to do so, the greater the proportionate share of the product of their work, and the weaker the share to be shared between the workers.
The broker does not want his constituents to be able to meet and arrange their business without his intervention. The opposite is so true that, the greater the distances is between them, the more easily he can get a fortune at his expense, buying for himself at a low price and to their detriment, when prices are low, selling for his account, more at the expense of his constituents, when prices are high. The slave owner lives by preventing the association among these individuals who belong to him, where it needs for them that they bring him the goods that they produce, and that they come to him for all that they need of use. The valet knows that the more obstacles there are between the producer and the market where he sells his products, the greater the demand for horses or cars, and the greater the proportion of food he will retain as compensation for its services. The shipowner rejoices when individuals are forced to separate from one another, as was the case in the last Crimean war; or when poverty forces them to abandon their homes to emigrate to distant lands, because this state of business brings demand for ships. He also rejoices when harvests are plentiful, and the quantity that needs to be transported, accumulates constantly, causing a rise in the price of freight. The real and permanent interests of all classes of individuals are one and the same; but their apparent and temporary interests are different; and that is why we see individuals and nations constantly engaged to the pursuit of the latter, to the exclusion of the former. Blinded by the idea of profit and the power of the moment, the great men of Greece and Rome took no account of this fact, that they constantly exhausted the forces of the society of which they were a part; and following in their footsteps blindly, those of Venice and Genoa, of France and Holland, of Spain and Portugal, followed a way exactly similar, always linked with the same results.
It has been the same, invariably, in relation to the trafficker, whose greatest desire has always been to maintain at its highest point, and even to increase the need for individuals to use transport and to limit even this need to use the instrument he possessed himself. The more completely this goal was reached, the more complete the centralization of power became, the more splendid were the places where exchanges were necessarily to take place, and greater the temporary prosperity of the trafficker was; but faster also was his decadence and more complete ruin. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Venetians and Genoese, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the citizens of the Hanseatic towns, and their rivals the Dutch, showed themselves ruthless at all times in their efforts to force the inhabitants of their colonies to come into their villages ports and to make use of their ships. At the same time as they sought to seize power as a means of gaining wealth, all this power was employed in order to maintain at its peak the burden imposed on other peoples, as a result of the need to effect change of place. This, moreover, gave them advantages for the purchase of the raw materials, by making them accumulate in their ports, and subjecting them, consequently, as today, to heavy loads and to considerable risks, and advantages equal for the rest of these materials, when they were manufactured and ready for consumption. Thus they enriched themselves momentarily, while they considerably impoverished all who depended on their assistance, precisely, as we see it today, in relation to the individuals and companies who trade with the unfortunate aborigines. from our western continent, with the Mexican population, with the Finns and Lapps of northern Europe, the natives of the islands of the Pacific Ocean and those of Africa.
Exhausting the peoples with whom they trafficked, they found a perpetually increasing difficulty in the maintenance of the traffic, in consequence of the constant increase of famines and epidemics, such as we see so frequently in Ireland today and India. As the population dwindled, the power to maintain the roads and bridges leading to the market was diminished, either to sell the miserable produce of her land, or to purchase the commodities necessary for her consumption; Some of this business is now seen in action in Jamaica and Ireland, India and Mexico; in all these countries the variety in the products of the soil is constantly diminishing, at the same time as there is a corresponding tendency to decrease in their quantity. Nowhere it is this sort of business more striking than in Turkey; It is about this country that a modern traveler said : "In every canton, the majority of the agricultural classes cultivate the same articles of product and follow the same routine of cultivation. As a result, each individual has a surplus of items that his neighbor wants to sell. This is precisely the situation in Brazil and India, Virginia and Carolina. Under such circumstances, - the power to maintain trade being nil, - the poor farmer is subjected to the "tender compassion" of the trafficker, whose power over him increases, with the diminution of the possibility to maintain relations with one’s fellow men; and from there comes that farmer is so enslaved. Such are the results which necessarily derive from this fact: the man has become an instrument used by the traffic; but that the latter does not succeed in profiting from such an injustice, is proved by the decadence and the definitive fall of the societies whose prosperity was due exclusively to this same traffic. "
My notes
Explain in your way the movement of trade and traffic.