They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
Interpretation
Competition for wealthy customers ultimately leads to better opportunities than having a monopoly over poor customers.
In this quote, Frederic Bastiat emphasizes the importance of competition in the marketplace and suggests that businesses should strive to attract affluent customers rather than relying on a monopoly over less profitable, impoverished consumers. The idea conveyed is that competition fosters quality, innovation, and better services, which benefit both businesses and consumers, while monopolistic practices can lead to stagnation and lack of improvement.
In practice
In a business seminar discussing market strategies, this quote could illustrate why diversification is essential.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
The law is the collective organization of the individual's right to lawful defense of his life, liberty and property. When it is used for anything else, no matter how noble the cause, it becomes perverted and justice is weakened. Thus, the law has become perverted by stupid greed and false philanthropy.
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rick as what they are -- a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.
What brought mass innovation to a nation was not scientific advances - its own or others' - but 'economic dynamism': the desire and the space to innovate.
Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.
The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century ... has taken place via globalization.
In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay.
People who live in poor countries have to be entrepreneurial even just to survive.
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