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Claude Frédéric Bastiat

Tags History of the Austrian School of EconomicsInterventionism

Works Published inWho Is ...Mises Daily ArticleQuarterly Journal of Austrian EconomicsArticles of Interest

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.

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."1

Bastiat emphasized the plan-coordination function of the free market, a major theme of the Austrian School, because his thinking was influenced by some of Adam Smith's writings and by the great French free-market economists Jean-Baptiste Say, Francois Quesnay, Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte, Richard Cantillon (who was born in Ireland and emigrated to France), and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. These French economists were among the precursors to the modern Austrian School, having first developed such concepts as the market as a dynamic, rivalrous process, the free-market evolution of money, subjective value theory, the laws of diminishing marginal utility and marginal returns, the marginal productivity theory of resource pricing, and the futility of price controls in particular and of the government's economic interventionism in general.

Bastiat's writing constitutes an intellectual bridge between the ideas of the pre-Austrian economists, such as Say, Cantillon, de Tracy, Comte, Turgot, and Quesnay, and the Austrian tradition of Carl Menger and his students. He was also a model of scholarship for those Austrians who believed that general economic education especially the kind of economic education that shatters the myriad myths and superstitions created by the state and its intellectual apologists is an essential function (if not duty) of the economist. Mises was a superb role model in this regard, as were Henry Hazlitt and Murray Rothbard, among other Austrian economists. As Mises said, the early economists "devoted themselves to the study of the problems of economics," and in "lecturing and writing books they were eager to communicate to their fellow citizens the results of their thinking. They tried to influence public opinion in order to make sound policies prevail."2

To this day, Bastiat's work is not appreciated as much as it should be because, as Murray Rothbard explained, today's intemperate critics of economic freedom "find it difficult to believe that anyone who is ardently and consistently in favor of laissez-faire could possibly be an important scholar and economic theorist."3 It is bizarre that even some contemporary Austrian economists seem to believe that the act of communicating economic ideas especially economic policy ideas to the general public is somehow unworthy of a practitioner of "economic science." For that is exactly the model of scholarship that Mises himself adopted, which was carried forward most aggressively and brilliantly by Murray Rothbard, all in the tradition of the great French Austrian economist, Frédéric Bastiat.

 

  • 1. Frédéric Bastiat, "The Law" in Essays on Political Economy, George B. de Huszar, ed. (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1995), p. 52.
  • 2. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 3rd rev. ed (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), p. 869.
  • 3. Rothbard, Classical Economics, p. 449.

The Law

Legal SystemInterventionismPolitical Theory

06/15/1850Books
Bastiat's essay is timeless, because it applies whenever and wherever the state assumes unto itself different rules and different laws from that by which it expects other people to live.
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The Law.pdf

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La ley.pdf

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The Bastiat Collection

Austrian Economics Overview

03/17/2011Books
The bulk of Bastiat's remarkable writing career that so inspired the early generation of English translators — and so many more — is contained in this collection.
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That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen

Legal SystemPhilosophy and MethodologyPolitical Theory

11/25/2022Articles of Interest
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
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All Works

That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen

Legal SystemPhilosophy and MethodologyPolitical Theory

11/25/2022Articles of Interest
In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects.
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War as Spoliation

BiographiesHistory of the Austrian School of EconomicsPolitical Theory

02/02/2022Mises Daily Articles
Frédéric Bastiat reminds us of the dangers to all sides of using military force as a means of securing resources or to bring freedom to foreign peoples.
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Should the State Support the Arts?

Free MarketsMedia and CultureEntrepreneurshipInterventionism

05/08/2021Mises Daily Articles
It is absurd to say we wish to do away with religion, education, property, labor, and the arts simply because we oppose government subsidies. Rather, we merely oppose stealing from one group of citizens and handing over their wealth to others.
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What Is Capital?

Capital and Interest Theory

In order to expand production and increase productivity — and thus increase the standard of living — it is necessary to use capital. And so it makes sense to pay interest on capital lent, so as to encourage the maintenance and production of capital for the future.

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Government

Political Theory

09/21/2019Mises Wire
I offer my own definition of government: Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
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