Ukrainian President Zelensky Calls for Support Amid Russian Attacks
Blowing Up Bridges, Narrowing Markets
When drones sever Kyiv’s bridges, they do more than break concrete; they constrict the market on which the poor depend, in pursuit of ambitions that will never yield the happiness they promise.
The image is brutally simple: a drone striking the Northern Bridge of Kyiv, cars upon it, a flash, a fireball, a gaping hole in the roadway. We are told this bridge has been hit on successive days, that another leading south has been struck repeatedly, that these are not accidents but a pattern of attack. A bridge is not an ornament of the prince; it is a workhorse of the people. It carries workers to their employments, provisions to the city, fuel and medicines and a thousand nameless necessaries. To strike it, not by mischance but of design, is to declare war not merely on a government, but upon the daily traffic of ordinary life.
When I wrote in *The Wealth of Nations* that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market, I had in mind rivers bridged and roads mended, which widen that market and encourage every man to betake himself to his peculiar craft. A city’s bridges extend the market hour by hour; they lengthen the day of commerce, they shorten the distance between buyers and sellers. To blow them up, or to render them perilous, is to narrow that extent, to throw men back upon poorer substitutes, to waste time in detours and idleness. The butcher cannot easily reach his customers, the mason his site, the nurse her patients. The blast reverberates through wages, profit, and rent long after the flame is out.
The first and most immediate sufferers are the labouring poor. The wealth of a nation, as I argued, is not the treasure in its coffers, nor the splendour of its ceremonies, but the annual produce of its land and labour as it comes to be consumed by the people. Interrupt that circulation, and you diminish the real wages of those who live from hand to mouth; their time is squandered in queues and diversions, their access to employment becomes uncertain, their provisions dearer and less regular. The man of estate may curse the inconvenience from behind his carriage window; the porter on the bridge may find that a single missed journey is the difference between supper and none.
The state which suffers such aggression retains, nevertheless, its ancient duties. In *The Wealth of Nations* I allowed that defence, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works that could never repay a private undertaker, properly belong to the sovereign. To rebuild the bridge, to protect it so far as prudence and means allow, is not an usurpation upon liberty but the very condition of any liberty worth the name. Yet even here, where the justice of resistance is clearest, the impartial spectator bids us ask who shall bear the cost. Every missile intercepted, every span repaired, must ultimately be paid for from somebody’s dinner, somebody’s schooling, somebody’s small savings against old age.
Other nations have, in this case, professed their support. A foreign ruler has visited Kyiv and spoken frankly of acting from self-interest: if the aggressor be not stopped there, its violence may hereafter be turned against them. This way of speaking will shock only those who have not considered how often, in human affairs, well-understood interest under rules of justice produces the most salutary arrangements. When a distant state furnishes arms or money today to avoid a costlier war upon its own frontier tomorrow, it acts as every prudent householder does when he insures his dwelling against fire. So long as the higgling and bargaining of such assistance respects independence and does not degrade the weaker into a mere instrument, the impartial spectator may approve both the prudence and the generosity.
But we must distinguish with care between the dispersed and often invisible costs borne by multitudes, and the concentrated, loudly trumpeted gains pursued by a few. A bridge destroyed imposes a small toll in time, risk, and anxiety upon thousands each day; no single sufferer can show a newspaper his particular loss. The political advantage sought by the attacker, by contrast, is gathered into a few hands and paraded as resolution, strength, or restored greatness. Here the deception I described in *The Theory of Moral Sentiments* is at work: men overrate what command and dominion will feel like, and are driven, by a childish admiration of power, to sacrifices that bring less contentment than they imagined and more misery than they foresaw—chiefly to others.
The impartial spectator, contemplating this scene, would not content himself with taking sides in a contest of vanities. He would lament most of all the warehouse worker killed in Sumy, the wounded citizens of Kyiv, the anxious millions calculating whether they dare to cross a targeted bridge. He would support firm defence and the repair of public works, yet he would distrust every grand design that promised, by more explosions and more decrees, to reorder the great chess-board of human society at a stroke. Humane, incremental measures that restore the free motion of each piece—each person pursuing his own quiet betterment under known and decent rules—are less splendid in the telling, but more solid in the happiness they secure. The business of statesmanship is not to be seen to act, but to leave as many as possible free to work, love, and cross their bridges in peace.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour as limited by the extent of the market and the sovereign's duties including defence and public works.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — The impartial spectator as the standard for judging conduct and the deception of ambition driving industry and conflict.