一课的经济.docx

“Parity” Prices 第 13 章“平准价格”SPECIAL INTERESTS, as the history of tariffs reminds us, can think of themost ingenious reasons why they should be the objects of specialsolicitude. Their spokesmen present a plan in their favor; and it seemsat first so absurd that disinterested writers do not trouble to exposeit. But the special interests keep on insisting on the scheme. Itsenactment would make so much difference to their own immediate welfarethat they can afford to hire trained economists and public relationsexperts to propagate it in their behalf. The public hears the argumentso often repeated, and accompanied by such a wealth of imposing statistics,charts, curves and pie-slices, that it is soon taken in. When at lastdisinterested writers recognize that the danger of the scheme’senactment is real, they are usually too late. They cannot in a few weeksacquaint themselves with the subject as thoroughly as the hired brainswho have been devoting their full time to it for years; they are accusedof being uninformed, and they have the air of men who presume to disputeaxioms.正如关税的历史所提醒的那样，特殊利益，总能驱使受惠的人处心积虑，去说服众人为什么他们应该得到特殊待遇。特殊利益集团的代言人提出对自己有利的计91through a few more stages. One group may indeed make gains—while the restof us take the losses.对于私人公司来说如此简单的事实，为什么用于国家，那些聪明人却会犯糊涂呢？原因在于，要认清这种交易的实质，需要人们把放宽眼界多看几步。某个群体确实可以从中获益，而其他所有的人则蒙受了损失。It is true, for example, that persons engaged exclusively or chiefly inexport business might gain on net balance as a result of bad loans madeabroad. The national loss on the transaction would be certain, but it mightbe distributed in ways difficult to follow. The private lenders would taketheir losses directly. The losses from government lending wouldultimately be paid out of increased taxes imposed on everybody. But therewould also be many indirect losses brought about by the effect on theeconomy of these direct losses.例如，专门或是主要从事出口贸易的人，可能会从政府海外贷款坏账中得到净收益，这是真的。整个国家因此而蒙受损失是肯定的，只不过难以追踪哪些人遭受了多少损失。私人放贷损失由放贷者自己直接承受，而政府贷款的损失，最后则必须靠加重税负来解决。此外，这些直接的损失会对经济造成不