What point is Bastiat trying to make in his imaginary petition of the candlemakers?

[hihi]

[mtlmnr49]

Directly from the petition:

"You are on the right road. You reject abstract theories, and have little consideration for cheapness and plenty. Your chief care is the interest of the producer. You desire to protect him from foreign competition and reserve the national market for national industry.

We are about to offer you an admirable opportunity of applying your — what shall we call it? — your theory? No; nothing is more deceptive than theory — your doctrine? your system? your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you abhor systems, and as for principles you deny that there are any in social economy. We shall say, then, your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him; and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages war mercilessly against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by perfidious Albion (good policy nowadays), inasmuch as he displays toward that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case.

What we pray for is that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves that we have accommodated our country — a country that, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.
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And, first, if you shut up as much as possible all access to natural light, and create a demand for artificial light, which of our French manufactures will not be encouraged by it?
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You will tell us that, if we gain by the protection we seek, the country will lose by it, because the consumer must bear the loss.
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Do you desire for our country the benefit of gratuitous consumption or the pretended advantages of onerous production? Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude, as you do, coal, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, in proportion as their price approximates to zero, what inconsistency it would be to admit the light of the sun, the price of which is already at zero during the entire day!"

It is an indictment of protectionism in all its forms. His point is that the government could pass laws that force individuals to block out all outdoor light during the day in order to 'stimulate' demand for the products produced by candle makers. The candle makers would devise an elaborate justification for such a law in an attempt to convince politicians that it is the best course of action. The candle makers would conveniently leave out the fact that there is no reason for individuals to spend money to produce light during the day when the sun produces it for free. Therefore the money the consumer would be forced to spend on light during the day would cost the economy more efficient allocations that the consumers would otherwise choose. In the end, that would actually decrease the demand for the candle maker's products.