Economic Humorist & Storyteller Frederic Bastiat on This Day in History

The Law, by Bastiat

This Day In History: Economist Frederic Bastiat was born on this day in 1801. Economics is often called the "Dismal Science" but this became less so with Bastiat often injecting humor into it. Robert Heilbroner writes in his "Worldly Philosophers": "There was...a man who has been almost forgotten in the march of economic ideas. He is Frederic Bastiat, an eccentric Frenchman, who lived from 1801 to 1850, and who in that short space of time and an even shorter space of literary life—six years—brought to bear on economics that most devastating of all weapons: ridicule...Bastiat had a gift for pointing out absurdities; his little book Economic Sophisms is as close to humor as economics has ever come." For instance, in his Candlemakers’ Petition he wrote of candlemakers petitioning the Government to help them combat their enemy the sun, as sunlight was hurting their business.

"If a posthumous Nobel Prize were to be awarded to just one person for crystal-clear writing and masterful storytelling in economics, no one would be more deserving of it than Bastiat. Here is the great pity of his short time on this earth: while he lived and ever since, his own country never possessed the collective wisdom to give him the honor and attention he deserved. His selfless courage in expressing timeless, irrefutable truths while almost all around him wallowed in fallacy constitutes a great moral victory indeed."~Lawrence W. Reed

He was also one of the earliest opponents of Socialism. “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” 

Other great quips from Bastiat: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” 

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” 

“When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.” 

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” 

“The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.” 

“The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.” 

“Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.” 

“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.” 

Download the Bastiat Collection here

Bastiat- The Broken Window Fallacy

In his essay, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, Bastiat introduced the parable of the broken window to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.

See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books on DVDrom

See my Economics blog at http://fredericbastiat1850.blogspot.com/