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Writing: The National Gain

The National Gain, § 31

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§ 31

This concept of the national profit, as critical as it may seem of our new arrangements, is really in itself the most innocuous and simple one.

It provides freedom for all lawful occupations, though not at the expense of others. It protects the very weakest trade against oppression and promotes industriousness and unhampered enterprise.

It weighs them all in the same scales, making profit the true yardstick for deciding which of them should be preferred.

It spares the Sovereign Power a thousand bothersome concerns, regulations and supervisory duties when private and national profit merge into a single interest, and the injurious self-interest, which always tries to conceal itself behind one regulation or another, can then most effectively be controlled by mutual competition.

It guarantees a Swede the enjoyment of his most precious and greatest natural right, granted to him as a human being by the Almighty, namely, to earn his living by the sweat of his brow in the best way he can.

It removes the bolster of indolence from those who are now, because of their privileges, able to sleep away two-thirds of their time. All means of living without working are blocked, and none but the diligent is able to prosper.

It will effect a desirable reduction in our lawsuits. The many regulations, their expositions, exemptions and applications, which in any way inhibit trades, will then become pointless and fade away, and once a law has been repealed it can no longer be infringed.

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