Frédéric Bastiat

Claude Frédéric Bastiat, economist, popular writer, and statesman, made seminal contributions to the advance of libertarian principles and policies. His influence has been enormous and is especially evident in the fields of public choice, international trade, and law and economics ... Shortly before his death, Bastiat put those principles into practice by becoming a leader of the liberal wing in the French Parliament during the short‐​lived Republic of 1848–1849 and was instrumental in saving France from the imposition of a totalitarian socialist state. He died in Rome on December 24, 1850 ...

Joseph Schumpeter described Bastiat nearly a century after his death as 'the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived.' Orphaned at the age of nine, Bastiat tried his hand at commerce, farming, and insurance sales. In 1825, after he inherited his grandfather's estate, he quit working, established a discussion group, and read widely in economics. ... Bastiat was supremely effective at popularizing free-market economics.

The Frenchman Bastiat (1801-1850) was enormously effective expressing the freedom philosophy in popular terms. Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek called him 'a publicist of genius.' Bastiat wrote brilliant essays and satires showing why protectionism is plunder. His most famous satire is a petition by candlemakers who want the government to prevent unfair competition from the sun by forcing everybody to block out sunlight.

Bastiat tried his hand at business, working for his uncle in Bayonne. It was here that he gained first-hand knowledge of the manner in which duties, tarrifs and regulations affect trade, knowledge that was to serve him in good stead later in life. An interest in questions of Political Economy was sparked and Bastiat began to study the works of Jean-Baptiste Say and Adam Smith with rigour.

Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist, legislator, and writer who championed private property, free markets, and limited government. Perhaps the main underlying theme of Bastiat's writings was that the free market was inherently a source of 'economic harmony' among individuals, as long as government was restricted to the function of protecting the lives, liberties, and property of citizens from theft or aggression. To Bastiat, governmental coercion was only legitimate if it served "to guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all.'

There is perhaps no writer better at articulating the economic way of thinking and exposing the myths that plague political debate than the Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat. During his short life (1801-1850), Bastiat wrote such classics as 'The Law' and 'What is Seen and What Is Not Seen'. He possessed a remarkable ability to pierce the sophistry of protectionism, socialism, and other ideologies of big government. And Bastiat did this with astounding clarity and wit.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was one of the leading advocates of free markets and free trade in the mid-19 century. He was inspired by the activities of Richard Cobden and the organization of the Anti-Corn Law League in Britain in the 1840s and tried to mimic their success in France. Bastiat was an elected member of various French political bodies and opposed both protection and the rise of socialist ideas in these forums. His writings for a broader audience were very popular and were quickly translated and republished in the U.S. and throughout Europe.

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was the great French liberal economist, philosopher, polemicists, and journalist.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) merits a hallowed place in the annals of political economy. A member of the French Liberal, or laissez-faire, school of economists that included the great J. B. Say, Bastiat marshaled logic, clarity, and exuberant wit in the cause of understanding society, prosperity, and liberty. In a series of brief essays and pamphlets, and a treatise on political economy, Bastiat taught ... that there is a natural harmonious order to the social world, an order that emanates from the free exchange between human beings driven to satisfy unlimited wants with limited resources.

While Bastiat appeared sanguine about what was going on around him, he understood that the reigning political-economic system indeed enabled the illegitimate privatization of what in a free market would have gone into the communal realm. "Of course, I know that in practice the ideal principle of property is far from having full sway," he wrote. "Against it are conflicting factors: ... there are services whose equivalence is impaired by force or fraud; in a word, plunder exists." Bastiat, who coined the phrase "legal plunder," of course had the state in mind as the chief culprit.

While the candidates are busy outcompeting one another in proposing new ways to spend our money (while promising to cut taxes), I take refuge in Bastiat's sound philosophy. Where is he when we need him? ... Think of how many things people in government do that they could not do outside the government. Those things Bastiat calls "legal plunder." ... Luckily, we have Bastiat to turn to for solace. But even more important, we have Bastiat's implicit strategic advice. Our family, friends, and neighbors would never think to threaten force to get their way because they know it is wrong.

More than 150 years ago, a French economist blasted the fallacy on which that newspaper article is based. Frédéric Bastiat wrote that to understand economic events, one has to observe both the seen and the unseen, including what would have happened but didn't. What he was refuting has come to be called the broken-window fallacy ... The fallacy, of course, is that, had the window not been broken, the shopkeeper would have spent his money in a way that would have made him better off than he was when he awoke that morning ... Destruction did not make the community richer. Is anyone surprised?

[G]roups lobby[ing] for entitlements [and] individuals ... lobby[ing] for occupational licensing laws ... are just two examples of how government takes money and property or prevents individuals from voluntarily dealing with one another ... Both Democrats and Republicans favor these sorts of laws and willingly participate in a system in which [this] has become commonplace. "Rent seeking" doesn't capture what is really going on. Neither, really, does "cronyism." They're both too tame. A far better term is the one used by nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat: "legal plunder."

French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) wrote a pamphlet 'What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,' in which he says, 'There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.' In the case of Florida's hurricane disaster, what is seen is the employment associated with rebuilding. What is unseen is what Floridians would have spent the money on and the benefits therefrom had there not been hurricane destruction.

When many people think "free trade," they don't picture stores full of inexpensive products and new industries emerging. They pictured closed factories. Nor is it is not to say that the defeated congressmen would have won any Frederic Bastiat Awards for Devotion to Unilateral Free Trade ... As Bastiat taught, Robinson Crusoe would never shove a useful plank that has washed ashore back out to sea because the free good robs him of work. He doesn't have enough time to make all the things he wants, so the freed-up time represented by the plank is a windfall.

Murphy brings home the major protectionist fallacy by quoting from Frédéric Bastiat’s famous "Petition of the Candlemakers," in which makers of candles protest the unfair competition of the sun. They call for a law "requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, ... and blinds–in short, all openings ... and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot ... abandon us today to so unequal a combat."

Bastiat was orphaned at age ten, and was raised and educated by his paternal grandparents ... He was a voracious reader, and he discussed and debated with friends virtually all forms of literature. His closest friend was his neighbor, Felix Coudroy ... Coudroy was initially a follower of Rousseau and, like most of Rousseau's admirers ... was a socialist. But Bastiat, who always said he preferred a one-on-one conversation to giving a speech ..., converted Coudroy to classical liberalism. Bastiat's first published article ... explained why all tariffs should be abolished completely.

[W]e find a nearly complete subjectivist-marginalist framework 20 years before Menger ... in the work of Frédéric Bastiat. In Bastiat's unfinished magnum opus, Economic Harmonies (1850), he, like Menger, put the spotlight on the choosing individual and what she tries to accomplish through exchange. Trade, for Bastiat, is an exchange of services that will render useful things ... It's up to each individual to evaluate the terms and decide if the exchange is worthwhile. Methodological individualism, marginalism, and subjectivism are all to be found in Bastiat.

The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect persons and property. Furthermore, it must not be said that the law may be philanthropic if, in the process, it refrains from oppressing persons and plundering them of their property; this would be a contradiction.

Frederic Bastiat ranks among the most spirited defenders of economic freedom and international peace. Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek called Bastiat "a publicist of genius." The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises saluted Bastiat's "immortal contributions." ... Said intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard: "Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an untrammelled free market."

Bastiat proceeds by parable, humorous dialogues, fables, satire, parodies of French literature, and— perhaps best of all—reductiones ad absurdum (tongue-in-cheek legislative proposals and the like). Really, all of Bastiat's writings, even the most technical, are in effect "popular." Bastiat, the gentleman farmer with practical business knowledge, argues from experience by way of clear propositions to conclusions which seem obvious once he has spelled things out. Taken as a whole, Bastiat's writings lay out the purpose, method, and conclusions of political economy.

One liberal thinker who was particularly adept at opposing the prevailing current of ideas in his day was the French statesman, journalist, and pamphleteer Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). An eloquent opinion leader who occupied a place in his society comparable to that occupied in our society by the pundits on the op-ed pages of the newspapers a generation ago or by top-tier political bloggers today, Bastiat made a career out of puncturing the fallacies of opponents ... To such opponents, he invariably responded that they were guilty of sloppy thinking in the realm[s] of economics [and] ethics.

By the 1840s, Paris was abuzz with socialist agitation. Frédéric Bastiat, the leading French liberal of the time, recognized socialism as a threat to liberty that was just as severe as autocratic royalism, if not more ... In the Revolution, the victims of this regularized robbery rose up and overthrew their kleptocrats. But then, instead of abolishing legal plunder, the new Republican government, by creating popular access to the machinery of legal plunder, invited the masses to partake in it. In the new people's state, "partial plunder" was replaced by what Bastiat called "universal plunder."

Thomas Nixon Carver ... attended a luncheon at which Leonard was the speaker. After the talk Carver approached Leonard and said, "Mr. Read, you sound like Frederic Bastiat." "Who is Bastiat?" inquired Leonard. Carver responded and promised to mail Bastiat's booklet titled "Communism versus Free Trade." Leonard loved it and soon issued it under the imprint of Pamphleteers, Inc. ... Not long after this, Mr. Hoiles reprinted three of Bastiat's books in the English translation of about 130 years ago. Several years after founding FEE, Leonard published Dean Russell's robust translation of Bastiat's The Law.

June 30 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Bastiat ... Bastiat wrote several important works, among them "Economic Sophisms" and "The Law." In all of his writings, he attacked tyranny, economic ignorance and self-serving myths. His observations about human nature and government are just as true today as during his time. Bastiat warned: "Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain–and since labor is pain in itself–it follows that man will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it."

Frédéric Bastiat knew what he was doing when he called his (unfinished) magnum opus Economic Harmonies. His purpose throughout was to show that the market setting harmonizes people's deepest interests and enables them to further their own causes by cooperating with others through exchange. For him, a central feature of the market is its inexorable transfer of wealth from the private to the "communal domain," as technological innovation and competition increasingly substitute the gratis services of nature for arduous human labor. As a description of this harmony, his book is a work of art ...

Bastiat praised the competitive market process — where the state abstains from plunder on behalf of any special interests — precisely because it transfers "real wealth constantly ... from the domain of private property into the communal domain." ... What he meant was that, when economizing, profit-seeking producers substitute the free services of nature (water, gravity, electricity, wind, etc.) for onerous human labor, competition drives down prices to reflect the lower production costs ... Innovation-with-competition delivers the fruits of the services of nature gratis, and the whole community benefits.

We simply don't realize how much better off we are because of the social cooperation, division of labor, and mutual service that arise naturally among human beings ... As Bastiat pointed out in Economic Harmonies,

It is impossible not to be struck by the disproportion, truly incommensurable, that exists between the satisfactions [a person belonging to a modest class] derives from society and the satisfactions that he could provide for himself if he were reduced to his own resources. I make bold to say that in one day he consumes more things than he could produce himself in ten centuries.

[O]ne of the keenest essays ever written on political theory [is] Frederic Bastiat's The Law. We are born into the world naked, he writes, and to live we human beings must produce the things we need. That's why we need property rights, and the function of just laws under a just government should be to protect these basic rights ... If you want a collection of Bastiat's essays that includes The Law along with other breathtaking essays too, get Selected Essays on Political Economy. Bastiat anticipates Henry Hazlitt and Ayn Rand in important respects.

After encountering Frédéric Bastiat's booklet "Communism versus Free Trade," Read worked with R. C. Hoiles, publisher of the Orange County Register, to reprint three more of Bastiat's works. The lack of interest ... was disappointing. Read surmised that "the rather archaic British prose of the translation must have prevented others from sharing his enthusiasm." Later ... he commissioned Dean Russell to do a modern translation of The Law, which eventuated in some 500,000 copies being sold. The success of the edition prompted Read to have more of Bastiat's works translated into modern English.

Reagan ought to reread Bastiat:

The protectionists compare the field of industry to a race track. But at the race track, the race is at once means and end ... [I]f your end were getting an important and urgent piece of news to the winning post, would it be consistent for you to put obstacles in the way of the horse that had the best chance of getting there first? Yet that is what you protectionists do with respect to industry. You forget its desired result, which is man's well-being; by dint of begging the question, you disregard the result and even go so far as to sacrifice it.

Americans, largely, rejected any law that took money from one person in order to give it to another person ... [This] was expressed by the 19th-century French legislator Frederic Bastiat:

The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect persons and property. Furthermore, it must not be said that the law may be philanthropic if, in the process, it refrains from oppressing persons and plundering them of their property; this would be a contradiction ...

Following in the French liberal tradition was the greatest libertarian publicist of the 19th century, Frederic Bastiat ... Bastiat was a great epigrammist for freedom. "The State is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everyone else" is one classic ... Bastiat celebrated the abundance markets create and mocked the blinkered small-mindedness of producer-centered economics, which makes human life less abundant. He showed how free markets achieve what the 19th-century socialists hoped to achieve through the state: more wealth and a better life for all.

There's another question related to both the Krugman article and measures that Congress is considering to jumpstart the economy: Where does the government or private money come from for rebuilding the destruction or bailing out the airlines? ... They both might benefit from reading ... Frederic Bastiat's pamphlet 'What is Seen and What is Not Seen,' where he writes, 'There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.'

It's when this happens that I think of Frederic Bastiat's essay What is Seen and what is Unseen, although the example is an imperfect one. The waver thinks he’s being nice: it can be hard to turn left on a busy street and letting someone turn in front of you certainly makes the turner better off. This is the seen effect of stopping to let someone turn in front of you. What the waver doesn’t appear to consider is the cost of stopping unexpectedly on the cars behind him ... Ideally, we would consider the costs and benefits to all of those affected, not just the obvious ones.

Frédéric Bastiat carried on this tradition by emphasizing that exchange arises out of a wish to be spared labor ... Further, Bastiat explained, technological advancement is valued precisely because it substitutes the free services of nature for human toil. In his uncompleted magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, he wrote, "It is characteristic of progress (and, indeed, this is what we mean by progress) to transform onerous utility into gratuitous utility; to decrease [exchange-]value without decreasing utility; and to enable all men, for fewer pains or at smaller cost, to obtain the same satisfactions."

The rights of the whole can't be greater than the sum of the rights of its parts. Frédéric Bastiat wrote in The Law, '... the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right ... the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force ... cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups."

Now, as James B. forms a part of society, we must come to the conclusion, that, taking it altogether, and making an estimate of its enjoyments and its labours, it has lost the value of the broken window. When we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: 'Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;' and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end - To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, 'destruction is not profit.'

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself—Here are a million of human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities ... [T]here may be much suffering within the walls of Paris—poverty, despair ...; but ... it is ... certain, that the arbitrary intervention of government would multiply infinitely those sufferings, and spread over all our fellow-citizens those evils which at present affect only a small number of them.

Which is preferable for man and for society, abundance or scarcity? "What!" people may exclaim. "How can there be any question about it? Has anyone ever suggested, or is it possible to maintain, that scarcity is the basis of man's well-being?" Yes, this has been suggested ... Restrictive laws always present us with the same dilemma. Either we admit that they produce scarcity, or we do not admit it. If we do admit it, we thereby confess that they inflict upon the people all the harm that they can do ... Such laws are either injurious or ineffective. They cannot be useful.

I. The Broken Window
II. The Disbanding of Troops
III. Taxes
IV. Theatres and Fine Arts
V. Public Works
VI. Intermediates
VII. Restriction
VIII. Machinery
IX. Credit
X. Algeria
XI. Frugality and Luxury
XII. Having a Right to Work, Having a Right to Profit

What a profoundly appalling spectacle France presents! It would be difficult to say whether anarchy has passed from a theory to a fact or from a fact to a theory, but it is certain that it has spread everywhere. The poor have risen against the rich; the proletariat against the capitalists; agriculture against industry ... [S]ince two truths cannot be contradictory, when the economist views with alarm a phenomenon that the moralist hails as beneficial, we can be sure that one or the other is wrong. Thus do the various sciences hold one another to the path of truth.