Happy Birthday, Fred!
Today marks the 205th birthday of my favorite frenchman, Frederic Bastiat.
Bastiat, a 19th century economist/journalist/writer/lawmaker, was a master at articulating and conveying free market ideas to the general public.
When you hear people talk about the Broken Window Fallacy, Legal Plunder, or what is seen and what is unseen, then you know Bastiat's message is still alive.
He once wrote that the free market was a "prodigiously ingenious mechanism which harmonizes the interests of the multitude enabling each person to enjoy an array of goods no one person could produce in ten centuries."
Conversely, he wrote about the "seductive lure of socialism". Those who did not place the free market in high regard incorrectly believed that "it is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic."
That's golden.
I personally didn't know about Bastiat until I was about 25 years old, but once I read his book, The Law, I was hooked.
Here are some more of his gems, with the first one probably being his most famous:
* "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."
* "If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world."
* "But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
* "The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."
In my mind, Bastiat ranks right up there with Jefferson and Madison for being freedom's best spokesmen. It's too bad that he isn't as widely known as the other two (Walter Williams called Bastiat "Liberty's Greatest Advocate").
If you want to learn more about Bastiat, this website is a great starting point. And you can always visit his wikipedia page.
