Frédéric Bastiat：Economic Sophisms, Excerpt 226

The immediate effect of the invention and employment of an ingenious machine is to render superfluous, for the attainment of a given result, a certain amount of manual labour. But its action does not stop there. For the very reason that the desired result is obtained with fewer efforts, the product is handed over to the public at a lower price; and the aggregate of savings thus realized by all purchasers, enables them to procure other satisfactions; that is to say, to encourage manual labour in general to exactly the extent of the manual labour which has been saved in the special branch of industry which has been recently improved. So that the level of labour has not fallen, while that of enjoyments has risen.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44145
Locator：Excerpt 226 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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