Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric
3. The Two Axes
4. The Lower Council of Labor
5. High Prices and Low Prices
6. To Artisans and Workers
7. A Chinese Tale
8. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
9. Theft by Subsidy
10. The Tax Collector
11. The Utopian
12. Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service
13. Protection, or the Three Municipal Magistrates
14. Something Else
15. The Free Trader’s Little Arsenal
16. The Right Hand and the Left Hand
17. Domination through Work
Economic Sophisms “Third Series,”
1. Recipes for Protectionism
2. Two Principles
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3. M. Cunin-Gridaine’s Logic
4. One Profit versus Two Losses
5. On Moderation
6. The People and the Bourgeoisie
7. Two Losses versus One Profit
8. The Political Economy of the Generals
9. A Protest
10. The Spanish Association for the Defense of National Employment and the Bidassoa Bridge
11. The Specialists
12. The Man Who Asked Embarrassing Questions
13. The Fear of a Word
14. Anglomania, Anglophobia
15. One Man’s Gain Is Another Man’s Loss
16. Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill
17. A Little Manual for Consumers; in Other Words, for Everyone
18. The Mayor of Énios
19. Antediluvian Sugar
20. Monita Secreta: The Secret Book of Instructions
21. The Immediate Relief of the People
22. A Disastrous Remedy
23. Circulars from a Government That Is Nowhere to Be Found
24. Disastrous Illusions
What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson
[The Author’s Introduction]
1. The Broken Window
2. Dismissing Members of the Armed Forces
3. Taxes
4. Theaters and the Fine Arts
5. Public Works
6. The Middlemen
7. Trade Restrictions
8. Machines
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9. Credit
10. Algeria
11. Thrift and Luxury
12. The Right to Work and the Right to Profit
Appendixes
Appendix 1. Further Aspects of Bastiat’s Life and Thought
Appendix 2. The French State and Politics
Appendix 3. Economic Policy and Taxation
Appendix 4. French Government’s Budgets for Fiscal Years 1848 and 1849
Appendix 5. Mark Twain and the Australian Negative Railroad
Appendix 6. Bastiat’s Revolutionary Magazines
Addendum: Additional Material by Bastiat
“A Few Words about the Title of Our Journal The French Republic” (La République Française, 26 February 1848)
“The Subprefectures,” 29 February 1848, La République Française
Bastiat’s Speech on “Disarmament and Taxes” (August 1849)
Glossary of Persons
Glossary of Places
Glossary of Newspapers and Journals
Glossary of Subjects and Terms
Bibliographical Note on the Works Cited in This Volume
Bibliography
Index
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“The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
—FROM “THE STATE” (1848), BY FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT
Claude Frédéric Bastiat was born in France in 1801. Two hundred years later, in 2001, I was invited to speak at his birthday celebration.1 I titled my remarks “Why Bastiat Is My Hero.” That was over ten years ago, but I do not have to look back into my notes to remember the reasons why Bastiat was and still is my hero.
During his brief life of forty-nine years, Bastiat fought for individual liberty in general and free trade in particular. He fought against protectionism, mercantilism, and socialism. He wrote with a combination of clarity, wit, and wisdom unmatched to this day. He not only made his arguments easy to understand; he made them impossible to misunderstand and to forget. He used humor and satire to expose his opponents’ arguments as not just wrong, but absurd, by taking them to their logical extreme. He noted that his adversaries often had to stop short in their arguments to avoid that trap.
My introduction to Bastiat as a student was snippets from his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles” in economics textbooks. The brilliance of this text still thrills and inspires me.2 In the petition, the candle makers call on the Chamber of Deputies to pass a law requiring the closing of all blinds and shutters to prevent sunlight from coming inside. The sun was unfair
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competition to the candle makers and they needed protection. Protection from the sunlight would not only benefit the candle makers and related industries competing with the sun; it would also benefit unrelated industries as spending and prosperity spread. Bastiat anticipated Keynesian multiplier analysis, although for Bastiat it was satire with a very serious intent.
Bastiat wanted Economic Sophisms to serve as a handbook for free traders, and, indeed, when I was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, we used his writings in our economic education efforts. Throughout the book, Bastiat attacks protectionist sophisms, or fallacies, methodically and exhaustively; however, he identifies a major problem of persuasion, namely, that most sophisms contain some truth, usually a half-truth, but it is the half that is visible. As he writes in his introduction: “Protection brings