Bastiat Society Meeting - January 6th

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Jennifer Baker from the College of Charleston. She will be discussing her recent paper published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, entitled:

"Money is the Product of Virtue: Tensions in Rand's Invocation of Market Success"

Please RSVP by emailing us here (bastiatsociety@gmail.com).

About Dr. Jennifer Baker:

Jennifer Baker is a graduate of Brown University (B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science, 1995) and the University of Arizona (Ph.D., 2003).

Her research is on virtue ethics, and she looks to ancient ethical theories as positive examples of how ethics ought to be done today. She teaches courses on ethical and political theory, environmental ethics and philosophy, business ethics, bioethics, and American philosophy.

The Quotable Bastiat

Voulez-vous que la loi remédie à tout ? C’est impossible ; il faudrait alors dire qu’un marchand qui attend, pour vendre son café, son sucre, de meilleurs temps, nuit à la société ; il faudrait donc invoquer toujours la loi, toujours l’État !

Discours sur la répression des coalitions industrielles

"Do you want the law to cure everything? It is impossible; in that case, we must say that a merchant who waits for a better time to sell his coffee or his sugar harms society. Then we must always invoke the law and call upon the state to intervene."

Speech on the Suppression of Industrial Combinations

Government Motors - A Day in Headlines

GM Replacing Top Lobbyist With Two Former AT&T Executives
CNNmoney.com

GM Recalls Corvette Models to Fix Roof Panel
consumeraffairs.com

GM Recalls Equinox, Terrain Models
consumeraffairs.com

US Treasury Gives $3.8 Billion More To GMAC
CNNmoney.com

Merit Pay Returning to GM
The Detroit News

"I don't know anything about cars."
- Ed Whitacre, GM's Government Appointed Chairman

Robbed for Their Own Benefit

"Ever since the advent of representative government placed the ultimate power to direct the administration of public affairs in the hands of the people, the primary instrument by which the few have managed to plunder the many has been the sophistry that persuades the victims that they are being robbed for their own benefit. The public has been despoiled of a great part of its wealth and has been induced to give up more and more of its freedom of choice because it is unable to detect the error in the delusive sophisms by which protectionist demagogues, national socialists, and proponents of government planning exploit its gullibility and its ignorance of economics."

From "Preface to the English Language Edition" by Arthur Goddard, in Economic Sophisms by Bastiat.

A Vain and Empty Hope

"Conservatives have often placed their central hopes in big businessmen. This view of big business was most starkly expressed in Ayn Rand’s dictum that “Big Business is America’s most persecuted minority.” Persecuted? With a few honorable exceptions, big business jostles one another eagerly to line up at the public trough. Does Lockheed, or General Dynamics, or AT&T, or Nelson Rockefeller feel persecuted?

Big business support for the Corporate Welfare-Warfare State is so blatant and so far-ranging, on all levels from the local to the federal, that even many conservatives have had to acknowledge it, at least to some extent. How then explain such fervent support from “America’s most persecuted minority?” The only way out for conservatives is to assume (a) that these businessmen are dumb, and don’t understand their own economic interests, and/or (b) that they have been brainwashed by leftliberal intellectuals, who have poisoned their souls with guilt and misguided altruism. Neither of these explanations will wash, however, as only a glance at AT&T or Lockheed will amply sho w. Big businessmen tend to be admirers of statism, to be “corporate liberals,” not because their souls have been poisoned by intellectuals, but because a good thing has thereby been coming their way. Ever since the acceleration of statism at the turn of the twentieth century, big businessmen have been using the great powers of State contracts, subsidies and cartelization to carve out privileges for themselves at the expense of the rest of the society. It is not too farfetched to assume that Nelson Rockefe ller is guided far more by self- interest than he is by woolly- headed altruism. It is generally admitted even by liberals, for example, that the vast network of government regulatory agencies is being used to cartelize each industry on behalf of the large firms and at the expense of the public. But to salvage their New Deal world-view, liberals have to console themselves with the thought that these agencies and similar “reforms,” enacted during the Progressive, Wilson, or Rooseveltian periods, were launched in good faith, with the “public weal” grandly in view. The idea and genesis of the agencies and other liberal reforms were therefore “good”; it was only in practice that the agencies somehow slipped into sin and into subservience to private, corporate interests. But what Kolko, Weinstein, Domhoff and other revisionist historians have shown, clearly and thoroughly, is that this is a piece of liberal mythology. In reality, all of these reforms, on the national and local levels alike, were conceived, written, and lobbied for by these very privileged groups themselves. The work of these historians reveals conclusively that there was no Golden Age of Reform before sin crept in; sin was there from the beginning, from the moment of conception. The liberal reforms of the Progressive-New Deal-Welfare State were designed to create what they did in fact create: a world of centralized statism, of “partnership” between government and industry, a world which subsists in granting subsidies and monopoly privileges to bus iness and other favored groups.

Expecting the Rockefellers or the legion of other favored big businessmen to convert to a libertarian or even a laissez-faire view is a vain and empty hope. But this is not to say that all big businessmen, or businessmen in general, must be written off. Contrary to the Marxists, not all businessmen, or even big businessmen, constitute a homogeneous economic class with identical class interests. On the contrary, when the CAB confers monopoly privileges on a few large airlines, or when the FCC confers a monopoly on AT&T, there are numerous other firms and businessmen, small and large, who are injured and excluded from the privileges. The conferring of a monopoly of communications on AT&T by the FCC, for example, for a long while kept the now rapidly growing data communications industry stagnating in infancy; it was only an FCC decision to allow competition that enabled the industry to grow by leaps and bounds. Privilege implies exclusion, so there will always be a host of businesses and businessmen, large and small, who will have a solid economic interest in ending State control over their industry. There are therefore a host of businessmen, especially those remote from the privileged “Eastern Establishment,” who are potentially receptive to free market and libertarian ideas."

From For a New Liberty by Murray Rothbard

Copyright © 1973, 1978 by Murray N. Rothbard, and 2002 this online edition by The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Used with permission.

Passed, but Unpopular

Best headline of the day:

"Health Care Bill That Is Hated by Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists, Christians, Feminists, the Media and the American People Passes Senate"

Reason, Hit and Run.

Anniversary of Bastiat's Death

HERE LIES

FREDERIC BASTIAT

representative of the people to Parliament,
Correspondant of the Institute of France,
born in Bayonne in 1801,
died in Rome on 24th December 1850.

Parliament will miss such an enlightened and conscientious representative,
political economny, such an eminent exponent
of its purest doctrines and of the harmony of its laws.
His family will only find consolation for such a painful separation
in the memory of his Christian death

in pace

Reliving the Crash of '29

Mises Daily: Monday, December 21, 2009
by Murray N. Rothbard

[First published in Inquiry, November 12, 1979]

A half-century ago, America — and then the world — was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time.

It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was the length, the chronic economic morass persisting throughout the 1930s, that caused intellectuals and the general public to despair of the market economy and the capitalist system.

Previous depressions, no matter how sharp, generally lasted no more than a year or two. But now, for over a decade, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness led millions to seek some new economic system that would cure the depression and avoid a repetition of it.

Political solutions and panaceas differed. For some it was Marxian socialism — for others, one or another form of fascism. In the United States the accepted solution was a Keynesian mixed-economy or welfare–warfare state. Harvard was the focus of Keynesian economics in the United States, and Seymour Harris, a prominent Keynesian teaching there, titled one of his many books Saving American Capitalism. That title encapsulated the spirit of the New Deal reformers of the '30s and '40s. By the massive use of state power and government spending, capitalism was going to be saved from the challenges of communism and fascism.

Read the Entire Article Here

Better Business Defense

If they want to improve the reputation of business, business people have to change the way they talk about it. So says The Economist.

A column entitled "The Silence of Mammon" says business can no longer rely on blaming "a few bad apples." Nor can it rescue its reputation by doing public good deeds -- that looks like appeasement -- and it can't win converts by boasting that business creates wealth. For those who don't place wealth high up on the scale of virtues, the argument rings hollow.

A better defense of business would focus on three things:

First, business is a remarkable exercise in co-operation.

Second, business is a creative act.

Third, business promotes pluralism.

Read the column here.

The Keynes Debate....continues....

Lord Robert Skidelsky and Professor Russ Roberts debate the legacy of government intervention and share their views on why markets fail.

Watch the entire conversation here