Bastiat Yesterday, Bastiat Today, Bastiat Forever

"Bastiat was and still is very relevant. There should be no doubt Bastiat’s writings have had an important impact on the world and it is up to us to make sure he still continues to do so."

Bastiat Yesterday, Bastiat Today, Bastiat Forever | Foundation for Economic Education

Bastiat?

Christopher Buckley writes of Ronald Reagan's personal notes: "In between is a lot of Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and a French politician of the 1840s whom I'd never heard of named Claude-Frédéric Bastiat."

Book Review: The Notes: Ronald Reagan's Private Collection of Stories and Wisdom - BusinessWeek

Campaigner For Free Trade, Political Economist, And Politician

"David Hart’s talk on Frédéric Bastiat’s contribution to the classical liberal movement, as well as outline his major works and key ideas such as free trade and peace. This lecture was delivered on February 26th, 2011 at FEE headquarter in Irvington-on-Hudson as part of the Evening at FEE lecture series"

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-50): Campaigner For Free Trade, Political Economist, And Politician In A Time Of Revolution | Foundation for Economic Education

Keynesian Tsunami

"It is disturbing to see the Broken Window fallacy being regurgitated so often in the wake of the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster."

Keynesian tsunami

The Quotable Bastiat

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

Ce n'est pas parce que les hommes ont édicté des Lois que la Personnalité, la Liberté et la Propriété existent. Au contraire, c'est parce que la Personnalité, la Liberté et la Propriété préexistent que les hommes font des Lois.

Bastiat Gets Some Love...and Gets Dissed in Springfield

First, the love...

Lilly: Principles must be defended, liberty reclaimed | News-Leader.com | Springfield News-Leader

Then the dis...

Government needs to adapt to times | News-Leader.com | Springfield News-Leader

Now let me summarize the dis:

"Anything written before today is worthless. The Ethics of Aristotle, the poetry of Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Dickens, and everything else that was written before some unspecified date in the modern world is as useless as an old loaf of bread. Only what is modern counts."

But, curiously, the writer reaches back to a dead white male for validation. Thomas Jefferson, nonetheless. And as you might suspect, the writer misses Jefferson's point.

Jefferson wrote his words at a time when freedom was the "new coat" and loyalty to state experts was the "old."

Reverting to rule by experts who know better is not "government adapting to the times." Rather, it is a throwback to the kind of world Jefferson and his peers attacked and successfully conquered in the American Revolution.

The Quotable Bastiat

"I do not address myself to those philosophers who, if not in their own names, at least in the name of humanity, profess to adore poverty.

I speak to those who hold wealth in esteem -- and understand by this word, not the opulence of the few, but the comfort, the well-being, the security, the independence, the instruction, the dignity of all."

Economic Sophisms, Second Series, "Natural History of Spoilation"

Je ne m'adresse pas à ces philosophes qui font profession d'adorer la misère, sinon en leur nom, du moins au nom de l'humanité.

Je parle à quiconque tient la Richesse pour quelque chose. — Entendons par ce mot, non l'opulence de quelques-uns, mais l'aisance, le bien-être, la sécurité, l'indépendance, l'instruction, la dignité de tous.

Sophismes Économiques, Physiologie de la Spoliation

Bastiat Reference in Chicago Tribune

"[In Chicago] the 5 percent sales tax forgiveness on back-to-school purchases last month, as study after study confirms, only shifts spending from other time frames with no net gain in sales. Ditto for last year's dollop — cash for clunkers — and this year's homebuyer tax credit.

In each of these examples, a politician or legislative body was either seeking to do good — reduce energy consumption, make something more affordable or put more money in workers' pockets — or was perhaps duped by, or just pandering to, a special-interest group or constituency.

As 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat put it, "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.'

The same bad vs. good demarcation holds for political candidates, city halls, lawmakers and public agencies."

Allen R. Sanderson of the University of Chicago, Chicago Tribune

Anniversary of Bastiat's Birth

The Quotable Bastiat

"The State is also subject to Malthus’s Law. It tends to exceed the level of its means of existence, it expands in line with its means and what keeps it in existence is the substance of the people. Misfortune thus afflicts those peoples who cannot limit the sphere of action of the State. Freedom, private activity, wealth, well-being, independence and dignity will all disappear."

Via http://bastiat.net/en/

Destruction as Development

How could anyone confuse the violence and destruction of war and natural catastrophe with economic development? Because they concentrate only on what they can see, and they ignore what they cannot...



From the Atlas Network

The Quotable Bastiat

"Who will dare to say that we have been gifted with strength, not to defend our rights, but to destroy the equal rights of our fellow-men?"

From "LAW, Spoilation by", in Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States, edited by John J. Lalor, first published 1881.

Plunder

The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.

~ The Law, by Frederic Bastiat

Below is a sampling of new or revised tax proposals since the Fall of 2009:

• Reinstate 36 and 39.6 percent rates for high-income taxpayers

• Reinstate personal exemption phaseout and limitation on itemized deductions for high-income taxpayers

• Impose 20 percent rate on capital gains and dividends for high-income taxpayers

• Limit value of itemized deductions to 28%

• Reduce the tax gap and make reforms

• Tax carried interest as ordinary income

• Codify “economic substance” doctrine

• Reform U.S. international tax system

• Repeal first-in-first-out (FIFO)

• .15% Tax on banking profits to repay TARP

• Climate revenues (i.e. Cap and Trade)
  

Information on most of these tax proposals can be found here.

The Long Shadow of Frédéric Bastiat

"Frédéric Bastiat's legacy has two key components: his artful polemics for free markets and his uncompromising conviction that men's interests are "naturally harmonious" to the extent that their property rights are respected. He was an artist with an unfailing loyalty to logic, and a revolutionary who fought the interventionist schemes of both the Right and Left despite suffering from a debilitating terminal illness."

From "The Long Shadow of Frédéric Bastiat" by George Smith, at Mises Daily.

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

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.

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

The Quotable Bastiat

Il ne pouvait donc s'introduire dans la Société un plus grand changement et un plus grand malheur que celui-là: la Loi convertie en instrument de spoliation.

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

La Loi/The Law

The Quotable Bastiat

"When legislators, after having ruined men by war and taxes, persevere in their idea, they say to themselves, 'If the people suffer, it is because there is not money enough. We must make some.' And as it is not easy to multiply the precious metals, especially when the pretended resources of prohibition have been exhausted, they add, 'We will make fictitious money, nothing is more easy, and then every citizen will have his pocket-book full of it, and they will all be rich.'"

"What is Money"?

Quand les législateurs, après avoir ruiné les hommes par la guerre et l'impôt, persévèrent dans leur idée, ils se disent: « Si le peuple souffre, c'est qu'il n'a pas assez d'argent. Il en faut faire. » Et comme il n'est pas aisé de multiplier les métaux précieux, surtout quand on a épuisé les prétendues ressources de la prohibition, « nous ferons du numéraire fictif, ajoutent-ils, rien n'est plus aisé, et chaque citoyen en aura plein son portefeuille! ils seront tous riches.»

Maudit Argent!

The Quotable Bastiat

Lorsque la Spoliation est devenue le moyen d'existence d'une agglomération d'hommes unis entre eux par le lien social, ils se font bientôt une loi qui la sanctionne, une morale qui la glorifie.

Chapitre I de la seconde série des Sophismes Économiques

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Economic Sophisms, Second Series, Chapter I