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The Lesson Restated 183with sympathetically, and that we try to see whether some of the gainsfrom this specialized progress cannot be used to help the victims finda productive role elsewhere.But the solution is never to reduce supplies arbitrarily, to preventfurther inventions or discoveries, or to support people for continuingto perform a service that has lost its value. Yet this is what the worldhas repeatedly sought to do by protective tariffs, by the destruction ofmachinery, by the burning of coffee, by a thousand restrictionschemes. This is the insane doctrine of wealth through scarcity.It is a doctrine that may always be privately true, unfortunately, forany particular group of producers considered in isolation—if theycan make scarce the one thing they have to sell while keeping abundantall the things they have to buy. But it is a doctrine that is alwayspublicly false. It can never be applied all around the circle. For itsapplication would mean economic suicide.And this is our lesson in its most generalized form. For manythings that seem to be true when we concentrate on a single economicgroup are seen to be illusions when the interests of everyone, as consumerno less than as producer, are considered.To see the problem as a whole, and not in fragments: that is thegoal of economic science.