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.Governments cannotavert these crises simply by policies in relation to food.They must insteadchoose a combination of public interventions, appropriate to each market.Condorcet s definition of minimal welfare in terms of the responsi-bility of government to prevent misery, oppression, and humiliation isopen, evidently, to continuous revision.He himself included commoditiesother than subsistence food in the requirements of a life which was free ofmisery; he later included education and schoolbooks in the requirementsof a life without humiliation.The most general importance of Turgot sand Condorcet s work on the corn trade is to be found, rather, in theiranalysis of the political limits to the operation of commerce.They use themetaphor of an economic system in the process of dynamic adjustment to-ward equilibrium.Government actions are both shocks to the machineryof society and conditions for its continued adjustment.Their analysis canbe seen as suggesting criteria for choosing the least disruptive of theseactions.The first criterion is the organization of the market (or non-market ar-rangement) which will be affected.In Turgot s conception of generalinterdependence, interferences with freedom in any market can have sys-temic effects.But he also emphasizes differences across markets in the ex-tent to which commerce and competition are complete.In respect tocorn, for example, the long process of establishing freedom has begun, butis far from complete.It is therefore especially vulnerable to what Con-Copyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy 84 Economic Sentiments84dorcet called the more lasting, the more general effect of governmentintervention.In respect to rural tenancies, by contrast, there are very fewmarketlike arrangements to be displaced.In respect to urban unskilledlabor the market affected by public works commerce may be very sol-idly established, and will not be disrupted for long by public employmentprojects.Turgot s and Condorcet s procedures imply that governments shouldinterfere in those markets where the expected effects on the organizationof commerce are smallest.The market for corn, where commerce is in theprocess of being established and where the long-term dynamic effects ofgovernment action are large, is particularly unsuitable.Turgot and Con-dorcet were indeed especially concerned with legal and psychological ef-fects.The old, regulated corn trade attracted the sort of merchants whomSmith described as wretched hucksters, and whose ill repute was forCondorcet only too well founded. 63 A merchant could never know ifthe laws under which he has bought will be those under which he will sell;Condorcet pointed out that this uncertainty inhibited real merchants,and favored men who know how to profit [from] prohibitive laws. 64 Itwas essential, under these conditions, to consider the long-term effects ofgovernment policies in different markets.The second criterion is the distributional effect of the policy.Turgot,like Smith, recognized that government regulations tended to favor therich over the poor, and the master over the workman. 65 Laws wereenforced to protect the rich, Condorcet showed, or according to the in-terest or caprice of the enforcers.66 It was therefore important to evaluatethe effects of policies on different groups.Employment policies, for Tur-got, were more just and efficient than policies to reduce corn prices.Gov-ernment expenditure would have to be financed by taxes, which fall on thepoor as well as the rich.But the rich also buy corn; policies to subsidize theprice of corn would be alms for the rich at least as much as for thepoor. 67 It will always be cheaper for the Treasury to provide employmentfor the poor, as Condorcet wrote, than to reduce corn prices for every-one.68The third criterion is the nature of property rights.Government inter-vention is least bad, other things being equal, where the property rights tobe violated by the intervention are least important.When Turgot pro-posed in his Lettres sur le commerce des grains to suppress certain privi-leges of bakers and millers guilds, he distinguished between the super-stitious respect for property originally founded on usurpations, andCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy Commerce and the State 8585respect for the most sacred of all property.the property of man in thefruit of his labor. 69 The rights of proprietors to impose rents in kind weresimilarly unrespectable; the rights of corn farmers were sacred.Condorcetdistinguished property in the right to impose charges, for example, from true property in land or goods.70 The classification of competing rightswas a matter of considerable dispute; Diderot claimed, in opposition toTurgot s views, that no individual property rights are sacred in relationto public concern or general utility. 71 The privileges of the mastershipguilds, the advocate-general Séguier said in the Lit de Justice, were them-selves a form of real property. 72 Public perceptions of different rightscould also be expected to change over time, as Condorcet showed.Butgovernment should try, as far as possible, to limit its interventions to thosemarkets where property rights were considered, by public consensus, to berelatively unimportant.The fourth criterion is the nature of the freedoms which are violated bydifferent interventions.Turgot and Condorcet, like Smith, criticized gov-ernment officials not only for violating property rights, but also for the vexation, oppression, and visits which accompanied such viola-tions.73 The Paris magistrates who paraded their paternal solicitude for thepoor, Turgot wrote in his presentation to Louis XVI of the reform edicts,also prized their authority to search the homes of laborers and traders, and to ruin merchants who had displeased them.74 Such oppression was areason to avoid intervention in the market for corn.The freedom of pro-prietors to send away their tenant farmers was by contrast based on injus-tice, or the denial of habitual obligations, and could therefore be violatedwith less regret.75Government intervention in labor markets did violate personal free-dom, especially when the poor were compelled to work in public projectswhich were thought of as degrading; Turgot s concern for the justifieddelicacy of poor people in the Limousin was an attempt to mitigate theseeffects.But to be dependent on the solicitude of the rich was also degrad-ing. Of all the words which console and reassure men, Condorcetwrote, justice is the only one which the oppressor does not dare to pro-nounce, while humanity is on the lips of all tyrants. 76 Government inter-ventions were least bad, in general, in those markets where only relativelyunimportant freedoms are to be violated.Condorcet s and Turgot s criteria amount to a quite complicated systemfor choosing between different policies.Governments could find them-selves choosing between interventions in many different markets, on theCopyright © 2001 The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeExam Copy 86 Economic Sentiments86basis of multiple criteria, and in circumstances where the criteria them-selves are changing over time
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