Friday, June 30, 2017

Has Real Socialism Ever Been Tried?

Has Real Socialism Ever Been Tried?

[Socialists are far more likely to deny actually-existing socialism.]

Consider these two couplets:

Socialists are far more likely to deny actually-existing socialism.


Couplet #1: "Socialism has failed." "No, real socialism has never existed."

Couplet #2: "Libertarianism has failed." "No, real libertarianism has never existed."

In both cases, the point of the first clause is to discredit an economic system.

In both cases, the point of the second clause is to shield an idea.

And in both cases, the shielding comes at a high intellectual cost: You escape blame for real-world failures, but also lose credit for real-world successes.

Y Denies that Real X Exists
Strategically, then, you'd expect advocates of views with few successes and many failures to adore the "real X" defense. Advocates of views with ample successes and few failures, in contrast, will use it more reluctantly. This expectation holds up: Though both groups have been known to invoke the "real X" defense, socialists are far more likely to deny the relevance of actually-existing socialism than libertarians are to deny the relevance of actually-existing capitalism.

But the fact that an argument is strategically useful (or harmful) for an intellectual movement doesn't speak to its truth. Maybe socialists are wrong to evade blame for their system's failures. Maybe libertarians are wrong to claim credit for "their" system's successes. How would you know?
Libertarians would conclude, "Socialism has been tried; libertarianism hasn't." But who else would concur?


One approach is to drop binary thinking – "real" or "not real" – and classify actually-existing economic systems on a continuum. Set pure socialism – full government ownership of the means of production – equal to 0, and anarcho-capitalism – full private ownership of the means of production – equal to 1. Countries below 0.2 are at least approximately real socialism; countries above 0.8 are at least approximately real libertarianism.

Ideally, you could just outsource this to e.g. Fraser's Economic Freedom rankings. But there are two problems. First, extreme socialist regimes like North Korea and Cuba don't even get ranked, presumably due to lack of trustworthy official data. Second, the rankings are top-coded. Hong Kong gets the high score – 9.03 out of 10, but it's a far cry from minarchism, much less anarcho-capitalism.
In any case, believers in the "real X" defense would probably just dispute the methodology. Suppose Fraser gave North Korea a 0.1, and Hong Kong a 6.0. Libertarians would eagerly conclude, "Socialism has been tried; libertarianism hasn't." But who else would concur?

Who Had Real Power?
The better approach, in my view, is historical. To ascertain whether "real X" ever existed, you have to find self-conscious believers in X who were, at some point, a powerless fringe movement. Why a fringe movement? Because it demonstrates that they weren't significantly compromising their ideals to gain power.

Next, you have to find the subset of such movements that subsequently ruled a country. Then, you have to find the subset of such movements that were so politically dominant during their reign that they had little need to compromise with any other viewpoint. Finally, you have to find the subset of the subset of such movements that retained extreme political dominance for many years – enough time to actually implement their ideals.

You have to find the subset of the subset that held political dominance long enough to implement their ideals.


By these historical standards, real socialism has happened dozens of times. Look at Lenin's Bolsheviks. Before World War I, they were a powerless band of socialist fanatics. Fellow socialists often loathed them, but for their dogmatism and cruelty, not lack of commitment to socialism. Then, a perfect storm gave the Bolsheviks absolute power over Russia – power that lasted over 70 years. The origin stories of the other triumphant Marxist–Leninist movements fit the same mold, though the socialists of the Soviet satellite states did have to compromise with the socialists of the Soviet Union proper.

And by these standards, I'm sorry to say, real libertarianism has never happened. Yes, plenty of libertarian groups manage to become self-conscious fringe movements. But none of these movements were ever more than junior partners in a broader political coalition. Reagan and Thatcher gave a few libertarians a place at the table of power, but they were hardly libertarians themselves. You could point to the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, but they included plenty of mercantilists and slavers. Even post-Communist Georgia doesn't qualify.

The lesson: Socialists own the disasters of actually-existed socialism – and we should never let them forget it. Libertarians, however, do not own the successes of actually–existing capitalism. We were there on the sidelines, desperately trying to nudge the world in a freer direction. But it's pragmatists that pulled the strings that made the modern world possible.
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and blogger for EconLog. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


Wednesday, June 28, 2017

The Creed of Socialism By Balfour Browne 1908


The Economics of Socialism By Mr. Balfour Browne 1908

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A Lecture delivered before the above Society on the 5th instant, Mr. Joseph Patrick, C.A., in the chair.

It is the creed of Socialism that all wealth is produced by labour and that consequently to labour all wealth belongs. Many of those who profess this creed have some other ingenious tenets, but one illustration of the hare-brained fallacies of this blatant policy will suffice. Mr. Blatchford, the editor of the Clarion, says: "Just as no man can have a right to land because no man makes the land, so no man has a right to his self because he did not make that self." If the latter proposition is true it is difficult to see how the former can have any meaning. If a man does not belong to himself it is absurd to suppose that what he makes or produces belongs to him. But it is not such nonsensical metaphysics as this that will do any harm to the society in which we live, it is the economic promises which Socialism makes, which tickle the long ears of some who hear, and set palms itching for gains they can never grasp. In the same book Mr. Blatchford says: "It is true that at present the frugal workman only gets about one-third of his earnings, "under Socialism he, the worker, would get all his earnings." The calculation by which Socialists arrive at the conclusion that labour only receives one-third of the fruits of labour are curiously inaccurate. They start with a fallacy. When they use the word "labour" they mean the people to understand manual or muscular labour. It is well, as Mr. Pickwick said, "to shout with the largest mob." But the idiocy of supposing that all wealth is produced by hands is a supreme effort of nonsense. Even the carrier of a hod has to use some brains. But the real fact is that wealth is far more the creation of mind than of muscle, and if mere creation is to be the deeds of title, it is to genius and talent that wealth belongs rather than to the stupid hands which only do what they are bid. The man who makes the sweet furrow is the man who invented the plough, not the man who holds the stilts. The man who discovered the use of a fruit is more important to society than the man who merely gathers it.

Here, then, we are face to face with one of the staring economic fallacies of Socialism. I deny that it is "labour" in their sense that produces all wealth. I know that there is co-operation in the production of all values. Nature gives us the raw material, which is half the economic battle. Genius teaches us its uses—how to shape the iron, grow the grain, grind the corn, bake the bread. The sower had to be taught to scatter the grain which "lies warm in its earthy bed"; the reaper had to be taught to gather the harvest which the sun's alchemy has turned to gold for us. So much for the first great Socialist fallacy, one which is addressed, not without effect, to the eager cupidity of a class whose desire is "loot," and who are quite pleased to gratify their greed under the banner of Socialism, and the promise that the reward of their robbery will be a new heaven and a new earth.

But we must not in our criticisms do any injustice to the Socialist arguments. Socialism knows as well as we do that capital must exist. No Socialist desires to do away with capital; all they desire is to do away with the present capitalists. "Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours." The change then, although revolutionary—and to be brought about, as the Socialists themselves admit, by revolutionary methods—is not so great after all. It merely means a transfer of capital which is used in the production, the distribution, and exchange of wealth, from the hands of one set of persons to another. It is true it is a transfer from the hands of striving, competing individuals, who have under the pinch of poverty, under the incentive of self-interest, under the attraction of ambition, done the best they could for themselves and their families, into the hands of the officials of a Collectivist State—who will still be men, who will still be selfish, who will still be lazy, but who, I suppose, would do the best they could for themselves. As for their families, they would have none, for women and children are to belong not to men and their parents, but to the State. The object, then, of Socialism is to do away with all private property. Property is still to exist, but it is to be in the hands of the State bureau, for the benefit of all. That is what they think, or, at any rate, say.

Mr. Victor Grayson, when he was asked by a heckler, "Do you believe in private property?" answered, "I would nationalise the means of production, but a man would keep his toothbrush and toothpick." There is then to be some private property. But there is not much use in possessing, even for one's very own, those two indispensable articles of furniture unless the man has something to eat, and when he gets that surely that will be private property! Socialism will not follow the morsel into the alimentary canal. But suppose that the workman has got his "daily bread" for his day's work, and that that bread has become his private property. I suppose it would not be a crime on his part to eat the meat one day which had been earned on another day. He might like his grouse "high." But if he saves a meal, that is all that private property means. Capital is the past earnings of labour (in the larger sense), of genius, and of the bounty of nature. Thrift has turned the payments for these, which might have been consumed at once, into capital—a beneficial instrument, which, if invested, will put the poor to work, will increase the production of the country, and, therefore, increase the wealth of the community. We call the fruit of thrift savings; but it is capital; it pays wages to others, replaces capital which is worn out, and provides the new means of production and distribution which are always required in a progressive community for some dawning enterprise or promising adventure.

But the most important, the most "taking," Socialistic fallacy is that labour in future is to get all it earns. At present, as we have seen, the loose prints of Socialist literature assure the working man that he is cheated out of two-thirds of his earnings.

There is a radical theory—but most of the present day Radical theories are the stolen rags of Socialism—that as the value of the land increases with the increase of population the unearned increment should be taken away from the man who owns the land and given to the State. Why the State should have it I cannot say. But really almost all wealth is fortuitous. The land itself, the air, the sunshine, the workman himself, are all the gifts of a bountiful nature. But even when man has intervened and produced an article which has a value in exchange, the value is almost in every case an unearned value. If he has laboured for weeks and produces something that no one wants, he has produced no value. If he has laboured for an instant or two, and produced or brought to market something many people desire to have, by what is called "a stroke of luck" he has produced an article of value. It is, therefore, not his work, but others' wants that create wealth. Take the case of a railway. It is constructed between two towns, and in the course of time there is an increase in population. Let us suppose that this has resulted from the construction of the railway. Does this increased rateable value of the towns in question belong to the railway company? Or let us suppose that the increase in population is due to quite other causes, say, the discovery of valuable seams of coal in the vicinity of one of the towns. The goods passing between the two towns, the passengers travelling between them, increase. Here, then, is "unearned increment" to the railway company. I think if it belongs to anyone it ought to go to those who are developing the coal field The stocks and shares in the company increase in value, while the shareholder, an idle rich or an idle pool man, has done nothing to bring about the prosperity of the line. The increment is a piece of good fortune is that to be taken away from him? But take the farmer's wealth on the labouring wain in the golden September, or the bulging turnips with their feathered heads in the crisp October! Was it his labour that brought about the bursting barn or the sweet winter food for the sheep and cattle? Not at all. It was the rich rains, the opulent sunshine. He sat idle while the spring and summer toiled for him. Are you going to take away the unearned increment from the farmer? But suppose I have a shop in a street, and the municipality or a company makes a tramway with a terminus close to my cunningly "dressed" window. My customers increase in number. I sell more of my wares. I have earned more, but without any extra labour. Is that to be taken from me? I am overdoing illustrations, but let me give you one more. Suppose there are two doctors in a provincial town, and that one of them dies. The practice of the successor is augmented. Are you going to take the increase from him? If you say "No" to all those questions you are answering the Radical contention that it is right to tax ground values and take from the owners of land the unearned increment.

But Socialism is more logical. The writer of one of the Fabian essays says: "No man can pretend to claim the fruits of his own labour, for his whole ability and "opportunity for working are plainly a vast inheritance "and contribution, of which he is but a transient and accidental beneficiary and steward, and his power of turning them to his own account depends entirely upon the desires and needs of other people for his services." Now, if that is so, Socialism claims to be entitled to deprive an individual of what he tins by his talent or labor personally produced, and to confer on the community the "unearned increment" derived from that personal ability. Where, then, is the economic advantage of Socialism to the worker? Under the capitalist system, by admission, he is allowed to keep one-third of his earnings, while the "fleecers" take two-thirds for themselves. Under the Socialist system he would have nothing for himself but the satisfaction of his needs, and the whole of his earnings would go to the State. It is, therefore, not true that under Socialism a workman will get all he earns, but this promise has touched the imagination of thousands of people in this toiling, moiling world.

The only sense in which such a statement can pretend to be true is that the earnings of every one will belong to the whole community, and of the total fund a man in this country might, after the revolution, be entitled to an undivided and indivisible 1-44 millionth part of the whole of the wealth. Well, much good may it do him.

You remember a pushing Britisher, who went on board a man-of-war at Portsmouth and asked to be shown over the vessel, on the ground that he was "one of the proprietors." "Oh," said the officer in charge, "one of the proprietors, of course," and he picked up a splinter of wood off the deck, and, handing it to the British subject, said, "Here, that's your share; be off!" It is only in a metaphysical sense that I can be said to be the part owner of all the pictures in the National Gallery. And the possession of all the wealth of the nation by all, is just as true under a capitalist as under a Socialist system.

But it is not true that all the earnings would go to the workers under Socialism. In my own view the proportion of the produced wealth which would go to the workers would be smaller after the revolution than before. But this is a fallacy which requires to be explained. If it can be shown that in future the workman will be a State slave, toiling for others and not paid for doing it, except by the satisfaction of his needs, how is he better off than the wage slave of to-day, who is paid one-third of the value of what he earns? He is in a worse plight economically, and, as for slavery, the slavery under capital may be whips, the slavery under Socialism will be scorpions.

One thing is obvious, and that is that the more that is produced the more there is to divide between Capital, Talent, and Labour. The system, then, which produces the greatest amount of wealth will be the best for the community as a whole. The question of equitable distribution amongst the contributories to the common stock of the nation is a different matter. Now there can be very little doubt that it is the capitalist system which produces the most wealth. Socialism proposes that there should be short and easy hours of labour, leisure and holidays for the workman, endowment for mothers, pensions for the old, free education and food for the young. These are the thieves of time. Production under such a system would diminish. Socialism is the endowment of sloth—the crowning incompetence. Dr. Schaffle says, I think rightly, that Socialism would "absolutely crush" out all willingness to labour on the part of the most skillful, and would thus result in an incalculable diminution "of the product of national labour, and hence also ot "wages." It must be obvious that when all men are to be equal, when a man is expected to work according to his ability, and to be paid, not according to his ability, but according to his needs, you are in fact bribing the able man to do the minimum amount of work. I agree with every word that Mr. Balfour said about this matter at Aston in November 1907. "The productive energies of this country must in future, as in the past, be based upon the individual energy of the citizens, and that individual energy can only be called forth by a system based upon the fact that what a man earns he possesses, and no greater injury can be done to the working classes of this country than to spread that feeling of insecurity about private property which is not the safeguard of the possessions of the rich so much as the absolute conditions upon which the production of rich and poor alike can alone successfully be carried on."

I agree, I say, that that dependence not on the individual energy of each citizen, incited to the best exertions by the hope of gain, but the falling back upon the compulsion which would be put upon every citizen of a Socialist State to do the minimum amount of work required by the State, would be a serious economic loss to the State as a whole. Instead of producing more, the workers would produce less. The disastrous result, therefore, of this Socialist expedient would be that the stock of wealth to be divided between the forty-four million people in this country would be diminished. This, then, would be a serious economic mistake on the part of Socialism. The modern corvee would be a blunder. No slave labour produces the same amount of value as free labour. Indeed, the policy of the one is to shirk, of the other to "toil terribly." It is the prizes of wealth, of position, of ambition, which tempt the man.

But, again, it is accumulated wealth which is of importance to a nation. Your Socialist State would try to live from hand to mouth. But to carry out great enterprises you require a "head" of capital, just as to get water to a great height you require a head of pressure. But individual thrift is like the thousand hollows in the hills which keep the showers in their hearts and feed the streams for months after the rain has ceased. This would be another disability of Socialism. If the State determined to remedy this and save large sums from the annual revenue for the purpose of future enterprise, all this would have to be taken from the wealth which is said to be produced by the workman, and which is said to belong to him. If it does belong to him he is not much better off by reason of the fact that it is in the State bank rather than in the private account of individuals, whose thrift has made a dam for the storage of the capital, which will set all your mills working just as the water in the reservoir will.

But there is another economic aspect of Socialism which it is worth looking at. We have seen the tempting bait which is dangled before the workman that to-day he only gets a fraction, under Socialism he would get the whole of the earnings of his labour. I have pointed out that the calculations of the figures of the division are the exaggerations which the heat of rhetoric always produce, and it is this heat that inflates balloons, which catch the eye and impress the imagination, especially if it is an imagination which flares up in the frame of a man who has hunger under his belt. Anyone can understand the fascination of Socialism when he appreciates the fact that in place of the "fleecing," and "cheating," and robbing of the poor, which is said to go on to-day, Socialism promises the hungry workman all that he earns. He is told, "You make it all; it is all yours." Mr. Grayson put up posters on the walls for election purposes with the taking cry on them "Ours for us." And Mr. Blatchford says, "At present the frugal workman only gets about one-third of his earnings; under Socialism he (the worker) would get all his earnings." This is a promise that the workman shall receive the entire product of labour and capital, and it is tempting—very tempting. But these economics are false. It is quite obvious that the workman will not get all he earns, even if it were true—which it is not—that labour produced the whole of the value.

First, Socialism is not foolish enough to suppose that any economic enterprise can get on without capital. As we have seen, it recognises the necessity of capital, but asserts it is in the wrong hands. But if to-morrow the whole of the capital was in the hands of the State, that capital would have to be managed, expended, and superintended by men. There would have to be a treasury bureau of gigantic proportions, with its red tape over all the capital of the country. But that bureau would have to be paid, or, at any rate, fed. The officials —they would be in shoals—must be a charge or tax on the gains of the workmen who produce all the gains. Even after the revolution it would not be "ours for us" But if there is to be capital, capital has a maw, and must be satisfied out of the total wealth. Machinery not only requires repair, but it requires renewal and improvement. In capitalist hands the renewal and improvement of machinery which is worn out, or which has become obsolete, has to come out of the receipts before the enjoyment of profit. And so it must be in a Socialist State. That must be paid before the labourer gets the gain of his labour. But a Socialist State is to be a State, and the staff under such a State would be enormous, as the duties devolving on the officials would be great. Not only would the Socialist Government have to perform all the functions that the Government of to-day does, but a great many more. The Government under Socialism is not only to be the policeman, the letter-carrier, the telegraphist, the judge, the commander of the army and the fleet, but is to run the railways, the manufactories, the ships, the mines, the bakeries of the nation. They would, too, have to be the ganger of the workmen, the compellor of labour, the regulator of production. "Suppose," said Herbert Spencer, "now that this industrial regime of willing-hood acting spontaneously is replaced by a regime of industrial obedience enforced by public officials, imagine the vast administration "required for that distribution of all commodities, to all people in every city, town, and village, which is now effected by traders!" But all these servants of the State— and their name would be "legion"—would, however essential, be men who would be producing nothing in the Socialist sense, who would not be earning anything, and yet who would have to divide with the real producers—the workers—the fruits of their toil. Now the only question is whether these would take more out of the total wealth than is taken by the non-productive class—the men who at present organise capital, who regulate production at present. It is in this direction that the Socialist cannot help us. One writer says, "It is when we come to the question of the economic organisation of the future, the methods of direction and management, that the light fails, and we must grope our way into the great unknown." I would rather not accompany Socialists into the dark. Indeed, another Socialist writer, Mr. Kirkup, says: "It is the new type of industry and economic organisation, the practicability of which must be decided by the test of experience. The present competitive system must, therefore, be regarded as holding the field until Socialism has given adequate proof of the practicability of the theory which it offers." This groping reminds one of the Chinaman who stole a watch and who returned the next day to ask how to wind it up. Socialists could expropriate capitalists, but they would have to learn how to use capital.

But to our thinking there is evidence enough to condemn Socialism as a rash and ridiculous experiment. If it is true, as M. Emile Faquet writes, that "In truth, in the Socialist State I see half the nation occupied in compelling the other half to work," and I believe it is, what becomes of the boast that the labourer is to have all he earns? We have seen that there will be first the claims of capital for management, for renewal, for improvement, for extension, and for new enterprise, to be met out of these daily earnings, and now emerging this huge and tyrannical machine, the half of the nation occupied in compelling the other half to work. Here is a charge on the earnings of labour—before labour gets even its daily bread—and, if M. Faquet is right, this last demand alone would make labour the ultimate recipient only of half its poor productions. But there is a great deal more to come off his earnings before he receives the "all" that is promised him. The Socialist State of the future, unless it can time its Socialisation at the precise moment that all other countries in the world become Socialist too, will require an army and a fleet. It is true you may call it a "National Citizen Force," as some Socialists do, in order to get rid of the difficulty of having an organisation in a Collectivist State, with its ranks, its officers, its commands, its obedience, but call it what you will, the citizen soldiers and sailors must be fed, and as they produce no wealth, they must be a tax and a burden upon the gains of the workmen who are supposed to produce all value. It is possible to conceive that the State would still require ministers and ambassadors, and all these must be paid or fed. These illustrations show that we are only cheating the workman when we assure him that he will have all he earns. The "parasites" on a Socialist State will be more numerous than the parasites on a Capitalist State. Under it mothers are to be endowed "during lactation," the old to be maintained, the sick to be cared for and maintained, the young to be fed—by the State, out of the labour of the workman. But there is another difficulty in the Socialists' way. If this country were self-contained the experiment of communism might be made more easily. It would be possible to fix a subsistence allowance, a labour day, and a great many other things, but if our foreign trade is to continue, if we are to have any international commercial relations, then the element of competition enters into our production and exchange, and it may be necessary to sell our wares not at the price which equals the cost of production, but at another and lower price, in which case again the poor workman is cheated out of some of the earnings which were promised him.

Again, I pointed out that the Socialists saw that capital must exist. Of course, the first acquisition of capital by a Socialist State from its present owner by means of the crowbar of revolution might seem easy enough. We have seen such experiments made on a large scale in history, and, on a small scale, any day in the records of police courts. They will "restore" the land to the people without compensation to the present owners. They will appropriate the means of production (manufactories and mines) and distribution (railways and ships) without paying for them. You remember the two vendors of brooms who met to discuss business matters. One said to the other, " I cannot understand how "you can sell your brooms cheaper than I can. I steal the "twigs which make the besom. I steal the handle, and I steal the string." "But I," said the other, a superior tradesman, "I steal the brooms ready made." If the Socialist State would follow that example they would steal the railways, mills, and mines ready made. But that would only tide them over a very short time. The total wealth of England is valued roughly at £8,000,000,000, and that is not much more than four times the total annual income of the country, which probably amounts to £1,700,000,000. But, as we have seen, machinery wears out, the progress of manufacture requires improvements every day. If Socialism stood still in this country, the people would starve. The State must go in in competition with other countries as our manufacturers do to-day. But to meet the wants of the future there must be accumulations of capital, for the £8,000,000,000 will not last long, and these accumulations in the hands of the State must again come out of the gains of labour before the poor slave gets his subsistence wage, which would be all that was given in answer to the clamour of his needs. And this is the man who was promised all and gets nothing—poor dupe!

One Socialist writer, with the view of misleading the poor pigeons of Socialism, writes thus: "Under Socialism, if Jones prefers objets d'art, and Smith prefers fast horses or a steam yacht, each will be free to follow his inclinations so far as his resources will permit." That is a good saving clause, "resources would permit." But does not Mr. Spargo see that the thing is impossible? If there can be private property in a Velasquez or a steam yacht there can be private property in anything. Indeed, his illustration shows that he contemplates the possibility of a capitalist class, which, under Socialism, is absurd. Mr. Grayson is on safer ground when he limits a man's possessions to his toothpick and toothbrush. I am not sure that, like the self-made man who used to speak about "my house, and my carriage, and my servants," who was reproved by his wife, who suggested that it would be better to say "our," and who took the curtain lecture to heart, and the next morning when dressing was seen by his wife searching for something. She asked him, "what have you lost, what are you looking for?' "I am seeking for my—for our trousers," he answered. I am not certain, I say, that under a Socialist State our trousers would be our own. But I am certain that if under the Socialist regime a man might not own his own wife or children, it would be out of the question to recognise his ownership of a steam yacht. No, all these must belong to the cormorant State.

But there is another economic fallacy which will probably bring any Socialist community to grief, and that is a claim upon the part of workers to have work supplied by the State. The request is only that the State should perform miracles. The thing that gives work is desire unsatisfied. To begin at the wrong end, and do work when there are no desires or wants, is to make a huge economic
mistake. It is a mistake which has been made before, and has always failed. Work not wanted is waste. But the claim of the "right to work" sounds honest. I am, of course, persuaded that statecraft may do everything it can to see that the trade of this country is fairly treated in foreign markets; further, may by negotiation with our Colonies secure by preference the exchange of products between the various parts of the Empire. So far as the claim of a right to work depends upon such State assistance, I am in favour of the recognition of the claim. But in such an event the inducement to work comes through the natural channels of demand. All that the State has done is to prevent these natural channels being blocked by tariffsluices or diverted by the insidious channels of subsidies. But this claim of a right to work, whether there is any demand for the product or not, is only a claim to alms. The wages paid under such circumstances is only a more occult form of poor law relief. But universal poor law relief is obviously a futile expedient. But the experiments which have been made to put philanthropic fads in place of economic laws have been failures. The experiment was made under favourable circumstances at the instance of Louis Blanc in 1848. With the help of the Government he established a national workshop in answer to this claim of "a right to work." There was to be work for all who wanted it. A co-operative tailors' establishment was set up at the Hotel Clichy, and the experiment is described in The Economist of 20th May 1848. The account there given is too long to quote. The facts were these: The Government furnished the capital necessary for the experiment without charging interest. It gave the national workshop an order for 25,000 uniforms for the National Guard to begin with. The Government further agreed to pay the same contract price as private enterprise demanded, viz., eleven francs for each uniform. Fifteen hundred men were set to work under these most favourable circumstances. The Government was determined to load its economic dice, and promised to advance two francs (is, 7d.) to each man as "subsistence money," pending the ultimate division of profits. All this sounds like a dress rehearsal of Socialism. But when the accounts came in it turned out that instead of profit there was a loss. Every uniform had cost sixteen francs instead of eleven. The master tailors of Paris, who could still produce uniforms at eleven francs each, laughed in their sleeves, and the State retired from the business of national workshops and no longer recognised the "right to work." Lord Morley of Blackburn (then Mr. Morley), in speaking to a deputation of Labour and Socialist bodies on January 6 1906, summed up the history of the ateliers nationaux. The experiment, he said, of compelling the State to provide work at a standard wage "was tried in France in 1848, and what was the effect? There they set up public workshops and the rest of it, and they paid a wage at a very high rate. The result was that private enterprise was drained dry. The end was ruin in six months, private workshops were injured, the men were no better off, and it ended in a bloody and sanguinary catastrophe."

The economic results of such experiments made by Socialism must be a loss to the community, and in the future we will hear of ateliers nationaux and the employment of the unemployed on a colossal scale, and this must be borne by all the wealth, which is, we are told, produced by labour.

That brings me to consider the economic losses of a community. I have said, and I think most people will agree, that our present system is that which conduces roost to individual effort, to heroic enterprise. A man is in earnest when he is doing something for himself. We would then, under a Co-operative Commonwealth have none of the spires of enterprise which jut out over the common roofs of to-day. It is the envy of the meaner thatch which aims at their absence from an intruded on heaven. But for one promontory amongst men there are a dozen bays. We see the millionaire who has succeeded; we take no note of the fifty toiling geniuses who have failed. If you look at the patent list you will find that not more than one device in fifty turns out to be of any service. How many of the printed things which come helter-skelter from our press are real books? But do not suppose that the State is not indebted to these martyrs its failures. It is the innumerable attempts which result in the crowning success. Now under Socialism there would be no room for this. That men should toil and fail would be a crime in that new State where there is to be no recognition of ability, no tolerance for noble failure. Here, again, in my view the commonwealth would be an economic blunder. But the State itself must make losses. We have instanced the case of the wear and tear of machinery, the obsoletion of designs; but there are other losses, and they are innumerable, which Socialism must write off before the "hand" gets all it earns. Suppose that Socialism bas in the neighbourhood of a coal pit "set up one great kitchen, one general dining hall, and one pleasant tea garden, and that is the Socialist ideal of comfort under communism, and the seams are exhausted. The collier will have to go elsewhere under the direction of a drill sergeant State, but the hall, the kitchen, and the tea garden are left desolate. That obsoletion must be paid for out of the pockets, or if they have no pockets (for Nature has a way of atrophying and doing away with organs that are of no use, and the "pocket " will cease to exist, indeed even now it is regarded as a relic of barbarous capitalism), out of their labour.

Now, as a matter of account, we know to-day that all these things which I have referred to are paid out of capital, and in the future State would be a charge upon labour, and the question for economists is, Would the residue under Socialism which went to what they call "labour" be greater or less than it is to-day? Socialism, as we have seen, offers no answer to that all-important question, and invites us to "grope our way into the great unknown." I believe that anyone who will consider the question will, on the Socialists' own showing, come to the conclusion that the burden upon labour, upon the worker before he gets his wages, would be more onerous in the promised land of Socialism than in the not very satisfactory realm of to-day. Suppose I am right, and that there was no improvement in this respect, and that labour had still to be content with its pittance of one-third, then what have you effected by your revolution? Nothing. What has become of all your promises? You have done away with enterprise and produced sloth. You have done away with competition and produced monopoly, which only means the taxation of the industrious for the support of the indolent, regulating, and bureaucratic classes. You have done away with individual liberty and produced a crushing tyranny. And for what? To give the earner an interest in a larger portion of the productions of land, capital, talent, and work, and you have failed in that. You promised an Eldorado, and we are still in a slum.

I have not attempted to deal with the Morals of Socialism, because it has none. Its honesty is on a par with its morals. Its loyalty stands for the abolition of monarchy, of course. Its religion is atheism. I have only dealt with some economic aspects of a communistic regime. I am convinced that these economics are a mistake. The plan of the Socialists, even with the initial advantage of appropriation without payment, could only end in disastrous failure; and the revolution, which in fleeing from the evils of to-day had achieved only slavery and misery for the masses, would be followed by another revolution which would hark back to the better economic conditions of our own despised time.

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Monday, June 26, 2017

Machiavelli's Prince, 1891 Article


Machiavelli's Prince, Article in The Nation 1891

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Mr. Burd's edition of ‘The Prince’ is not only remarkable as being the work of an Englishman, but as being the edition for which the world has been looking for three hundred and fifty years. He has at last made it possible for any reader to form an unprejudiced opinion of the meaning of Machiavelli’s famous treatise. With all the patience, industry, and research of a German, he has collected his materials, and he has set them forth with a clearness and terseness to which but few Germans attain. The service which he has thus rendered must be as permanent as is the interest of ‘The Prince’ itself, for he has at last moored to the solid rock of fact that work which has, during ten generations, been drifting to and fro on the conflicting tides of opinion. How important this achievement is hardly needs to be explained here, because every one who knows anything about Machiavelli knows that, as the ablest exponent of one of the great theories of political authority and ethics, he has not been and cannot be superseded. Machiavellianism is an element which human society has not eliminated, a force whose working can be as clearly traced to-day as in the days of the Borgias.

Regarded as an artistic creation, Machiavelli's Prince has had no peer in modern literature except Goethe’s Mephistopheles; the former is the personification of the selfishness of a State, as the latter is of the selfishness of the individual who denies all obligations to God or man, and seeks only to gratify his passions, whatever may be the injury he inflicts on his fellows. But Machiavelli had no poet’s creation in view when he drew his portrait of the Prince; his aim was intensely practical, and he trusted to observation, to facts, not to sentiment or imagination, for the substance of his work. Seeing Italy harassed by a multitude of petty tyrants, and constantly overrun by foreign invaders, he believed that her only hope lay in the expulsion of the "barbarians,” and in the gradual consolidation of her distracted provinces under the sway of one ruler. But what sort of a man must such a ruler be? What are the means by which princes acquire and hold States’? These are the questions Machiavelli asks himself, and to find answers to them he examines the actual methods and characteristics of the princes of his own and former ages. He discovers that not devotion to the common weal, but to self-interest, not justice but success, not right but might, are the great forces and considerations which determine the actions of monarchs. Therefore, a prince who would succeed must excel his rivals in the employment of craft or cruelty; morals no more concern him than they concern a general in battle; his one duty is to conquer, and, if he conquer, victory excuses all his crimes. Indeed, the Prince (or State) cannot truly be said to commit crimes, being a law unto himself. “I do not describe what ought to be, but what I,” Machiavelli would retort to his critics. “You may prefer a world which you would call more moral, but this is the world in which we are placed, these are the tricks and forces which dominate it. It is as idle to complain that a monster like Alexander VI. occupies the chair of St. Peter, or that ruffians like the Sforza lord it over Lombardy, as that water runs down hill. The facts are as I have stated them: strength prevails over weakness though the strong man be wicked and the weak be virtuous; shrewdness and guile impose upon simplicity; it is not a question as to which is ideally worthier, but as to which succeeds.”

The best proof of the accuracy of Machiavelli's portrait is the storm of abuse that it provoked. He had blabbed an open secret, and from both princes and peoples came an indignant denial. The former protested that they were not the villains, the latter that they were not the fools, he painted them. They branded him as a blasphemer of human nature, as a cynic and reprobate who imputed to mankind the basest motives. His enemies, not content with assailing his maxims, loaded his memory with evil insinuations that he was personally a depraved man—as if to imply that his horrid
opinions were the natural outcome of his life. Even his apologists dared not defend the literal interpretation of his treatise, but they insisted that it had a hidden meaning which justified it and exonerated its author. Cardinal Pole, one of the earliest and most virulent of Machiavelli's critics, states that when he attacked ‘The Prince’ before Machiavelli's fellow-citizens, they always replied,

“as they said M. himself did, that in the book he had regard not only to his own feeling, but also to that of the man to whom he was writing. Now this man [Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici] he knew for a tyrant by nature, and so he put in things which could not fail to please such a nature exceedingly. Still he, like every other writer on the education of a king or prince, was of opinion, and experience verifies it, that these very things would, if carried out in practice, make the tyrant’s reign a short one. Now this was exactly what he desired, for his heart was all afire with hatred of the Prince to whom he wrote, and he had no other object in the book except this —by writing to a tyrant things which a tyrant loves, to hurl him, if possible, headlong to self-destruction.”

Another school of defenders maintained that Machiavelli did not so much aim at hastening the downfall of princes by instigating them by his disingenuous counsel, to commit fatal blunders, as to put in the minds of the people a knowledge of the cunning by which they had been duped, in order that they might thenceforth be duped no more. This latter, which we may call the “antidote theory," since, according to its advocates, Machiavelli, in describing the effects of political poisons, suggested their remedy, has been, on the whole, the most popular of all the various apologies; and it is worth recording that the Italians, during their long struggle to oust the Austrian “barbarian" and to shake off their native despots during the present century, quoted, after Dante, none of their bygone great men more often than Machiavelli. But, on the other hand, the army of his enemies, large from the first, have kept up a persistent fire down to the present time, varying their points of attack and adopting different weapons, but holding fast to their detestation of “Old Nick." To abominate him and his doctrines has long been an easy way to win reputation for superior virtue; but might it not be cited as evidence of the skill with which Machiavelli dissected human nature? It is significant that the Company of Jesus, which has persistently followed the teachings of ‘The Prince,‘ and that Frederick the Great, a Machiavellian monarch if ever there was one, have been among the loudest to denounce and deny their master. The attitude of the world towards Machiavelli reminds me of that of a camp meeting at which the revivalist preacher requests those of his hearers who hate the devil to stand up—and all rise.

But this is not the place in which to record and examine the great mass of prejudices and opinions which have, for three centuries and a half, prevented ‘The Prince’ from being dispassionately viewed; merely to indicate them will suffice for our present purpose, which is to express deep satisfaction that, with the publication of Mr. Burd's book, any excuse for misconceptions in the future is removed. He indulges in no empty or Pharisaical abuse, he does not hold up his hands in holy horror, nor believe that by declaring that he detests lying and killing he has "answered" Machiavelli. Wisely leaving the Ten Commandments to defend themselves, be aims simply at giving the reader every possible help to understand exactly what Machiavelli meant, and he does this by furnishing ample historical information about the period in which the Florentine Secretary lived, and by elucidating ‘The Prince’ with quotations from Machiavelli's other works. Thus we are able to see how much of Machiavelli's doctrine was common to his time, and how much was peculiar to himself, and to estimate his work as a whole, instead of in fragments. Hitherto, it has been too much the habit of critics to pick out a few obnoxious sentences and to direct their whole attention to them; Mr. Burd makes it possible for any one to know which opinions Machiavelli elsewhere qualified, which he abandoned, and which he held to the end of his life.

Instead of writing a formal biographical and critical introduction, Mr. Burd limits himself to a brief statement of the purpose of ‘The Prince,’ of the conditions under which it was produced, and of the attitude of early critics towards it; then, in a copious Historical Abstract, he sets down year by year the principal events in Italian politics and in Machiavelli’s personal fortunes, between 1469 and 1527. By this last plan the reader can turn quickly from any passage in ‘The Prince,’ in which contemporary affairs are alluded to, and find a succinct narrative of them, this is all the more important because Machiavelli draws from the current affairs of his day most of the illustrations for his doctrines. Mr. Burd’s knowledge of the history of Medicean ltaly will best be appreciated by those who have themselves studied the Renaissance most thoroughly. It is rare indeed to come upon so comprehensive a summary of any epoch as that on pp. 23-26, in which the condition of decaying Italy is described with great force and compactness; and many of the notes, as, for instance, the short preface to chaps. 8 and 18, and the note on Caesar Borgia (pp. 214-217), are models of what the best editorial work should be.

The key to Mr. Burd’s own attitude towards 'The Prince,’ and, as we firmly believe, the true one, is contained in the following passage (p. 16):

"In modern times hardly any science of which the subject-matter is man, viewed under one aspect singled out from many others, has been brave enough to neglect the other points of view from which man may be regarded. Political Economy is the classical exception; and it is characteristic of modern feeling that there should be so much opposition to those who choose to regard men solely as creatures under the laws of supply and demand; and the belief that to disregard moral causes which influence even commercial action vitiates the conclusions of political economists, is in a measure justified. The same holds good of political science: any attempt to reckon without the sentiments and permanent moral convictions of men is doomed beforehand to failure. But there may he a moral interest in eliminating one side of human nature, the most capricious and the least subject to law, in order to trace the operations of cause and effect. assuming that no disturbing agencies will be present.

"Machiavelli, in ‘The Prince,’ has eliminated sentiment and morality, though the interest to him was not merely scientific. but practical also; he did so partly deliberately and partly without any distinct consciousness that he was mutilating human nature. But whatever considerations determined the method he employed, he followed it without swerving, consistently and logically. . . Whether by thus considering only one aspect of human nature at a time he has vitiated his own conclusions, or whether this is rather the condition upon which alone he could solve the problem which he set himself, may be doubled; but it would be unfair in any case to argue from his silence and his omissions that he had lost the consciousness that man might be regarded as a moral being; he merely declined to allow moral considerations to interfere, as he believed they did, with the logical discussion of the subject in hand."

Readers who are acquainted with Lord Acton's great erudition and ability, and who have cause to regret that he so seldom displays them in print, will turn at once to his Introduction, and will probably be disappointed by it, at least at first. For instead of its being a criticism by Lord Acton upon so remarkable a personage as Machiavelli, it is rather a collection, gathered from the most various and recondite sources, of the opinions which philosophers, politicians, and theologians have expressed on Machiavelli and Machiavellianism during the past three hundred years. Only the cement in which these mosaic-bits are embedded in Lord Acton'a own, but from the design he has wrought, and from his brief comments, we can infer what his own views are. He would maintain that Machiavelli’s account of the practice of rulers and states is in the main correct; that, whatever may be the talk about moral considerations, self-interest really determines international policy, and that the cases in which an unselfish motive has prevailed are few compared with the habitual employment of Machiavellian principle.

On the surface we are easy-going optimists, whatever may be our inmost genuine convictions, and either we strive not to see the evil forces by which we are hemmed in, or we call them by pleasant names. We assume that many of the enormities which shock as as we look back upon the past, perished with the past. But it is better to know the truth than to dream in a Fool’s Paradise, for, until we have measured an abuse, we cannot successfully combat it. And Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ is one of the books which should be read and pondered by every man who would see some of the aims and methods that have characterized the dealings of states and rulers since the beginning of history. The form which Machiavellianism assumes may vary, but its essence remains fixed. Europe to day is as much under the sway of selfish principles as Italy was at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The belief that might makes right, that there is no appeal from brute force, that the State can do no wrong, that success justifies all measures, and that weakness is the only failure, the only unpardonable sin — these are so easily deducible from the current practice of European nations that we need do no more than mention them; and these are true Machiavellian doctrines. We are shocked at the name, but not at the thing. Metternich, Louis Napoleon, Bismarck, Beaconsfleld  — be the result of their policy, good or bad—were all practical disciples of the Florentine master of statecraft; and as evidence that under a republican form of government human nature does not change, we need only cite the success of such vulgar and clumsy Machiavellians as Butler, Blaine, and Quay. Their success is the best evidence that our public would be benefited by reading ‘The Prince,‘ in which are set down, as in a scientific treatise, the signs by which the political charlatan can be detected and so guarded against. Of course, Machiavelli no more invented the traits which are called by his name than Goethe invented those traits in human nature which he personified in Mephistopheles; to have analyzed and described them as he has done assures for him and his book the permanent attention of students of politics and ethics. “Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion, have not,” says Lord Acton, "reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. He obtains a new lease of authority from causes that are still prevailing, and from doctrines that are apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. Without sparing censure or employing for comparison the grosser symptoms of the age, we find him near our common level, and perceive that he is not a vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence.”

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Thursday, June 22, 2017

The Origin of the word "Dollar" - Article in The Scrap Book 1906


The Origin of the word "Dollar" - Article in The Scrap Book 1906

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Lexicographers Agree That the Term is a Corruption of the Name of a Bohemian Silver Mine Which Supplied the First "Thalers."

WE Americans commonly regard the word "dollar" as peculiarly and wholly our own. It seems in some psychic way to be a part of our very life, and our patriotism is stirred when we think of any other nation laying claim to it. Yet it is not all ours, or at least it did not begin with us, but came from far-off Bohemia.

The derivation of the word "dollar," suggested in Todd's edition of Johnson (Johnson's English Dictionary, as Improved by Todd), is confirmed by the particular explanation of later lexicographers.

In 1516 a silver mine was discovered at Joachim's Thal (St. Joachim's Dale), in Bohemia, and the proprietors in the following year issued a great number of silver pieces, of about the value of the Spanish psoduro, which bore the name of Joachimsthaler, subsequently abbreviated into dollar.

Thus the dollar, like the guinea, commemorates the place from which it was originally coined.

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Monday, June 19, 2017

Frederic Bastiat, Ingenious Champion for Liberty and Peace

Frederic Bastiat, Ingenious Champion for Liberty and Peace

The author thanks long-time FEE senior staffer Bettina Bien Greaves for making available the Dean Russell Collection, quite possibly the world’s most extensive archive of Bastiat material.
Frederic Bastiat ranks among the most spirited defenders of economic freedom and international peace.

Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek called Bastiat a publicist of genius. The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises saluted Bastiat’s immortal contributions. Best-selling economics journalist Henry Hazlitt marveled at Bastiat’s uncanny clairvoyance. Said intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard: Bastiat was indeed a lucid and superb writer, whose brilliant and witty essays and fables to this day are remarkable and devastating demolitions of protectionism and of all forms of government subsidy and control. He was a truly scintillating advocate of an untrammeled free market.

The Provisioning of Paris
Witness the eloquence with which Bastiat expressed the seeming miracle of free-market prosperity and predicted the failure of government intervention: On coming to Paris for a visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die in a few days if supplies of all sorts did not flow into this great metropolis. It staggers the imagination to try to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow, if its inhabitants are to be preserved from the horrors of famine, insurrection, and pillage. And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment, without being disturbed for a single instant by the idea of so frightful a prospect. On the other hand, eighty departments have worked today, without co-operative planning or mutual arrangements, to keep Paris supplied.

How does each succeeding day manage to bring to this gigantic market just what is necessary—neither too much nor too little? What, then, is the resourceful and secret power that governs the amazing regularity of such complicated movements, a regularity in which everyone has such implicit faith, although his prosperity and his very life depend upon it? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free exchange. We put our faith in that inner light which Providence has placed in the hearts of all men, and to which has been entrusted the preservation and the unlimited improvement of our species, a light we term self-interest, which is so illuminating, so constant, and so penetrating, when it is left free of every hindrance.

Where would you be, inhabitants of Paris, if some cabinet minister decided to substitute for that power contrivances of his own invention, however superior we might suppose them to be; if he proposed to subject this prodigious mechanism to his supreme direction, to take control of all of it into his own hands, to determine by whom, where, how, and under what conditions everything should be produced, transported, exchanged, and consumed? Although there may be much suffering within your walls, although misery, despair, and perhaps starvation, cause more tears to flow than your warm-hearted charity can wipe away, it is probable, I dare say it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of the government would infinitely multiply this suffering and spread among all of you the ills that now affect only a small number of your fellow-citizens.

Bastiat’s work offers an enormous wealth of such gems. For instance: The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

• Nothing enters the public treasury for the benefit of a citizen or a class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to put it there . . . heavy government expenditures and liberty are incompatible.

• War, slavery, imposture, inequitable taxation, monopoly, privilege, unethical practices, colonialism, the right to employment, the right to credit, the right to education, the right to public aid, progressive taxation in direct or inverse ratio to the ability to pay—all are so many battering rams.

• If nations remain permanently in the world market; if their interrelations cannot be broken without their peoples’ suffering the double discomfort of privation and glut; they will no longer need the mighty navies that bankrupt them or the vast armies that weigh them down.

• To be free, on one’s own responsibility, to think and to act, to speak and to write, to labor and to exchange, to teach and to learn—this alone is to be free.

Bastiat was a blazing light of French classical liberalism, which developed awesome intellectual firepower. The most illustrious names include Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781), Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau (1749-1791), Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832), Victor Hugo (1802-1885), and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). Bastiat stood on the shoulders of his predecessors, helped keep alive a vision of natural rights, inspired his compatriots, and won new converts. He reached out to free-trade crusader Richard Cobden in England, and he inspired John Prince Smith, who launched the free-trade movement in Germany. Bastiat’s influence extended into Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden as well.

He certainly didn’t look impressive. In 1845, his friend Gustave de Molinari recalled: With his long hair, his small hat, his large frock coat and his family umbrella, he could have been easily mistaken for an honest peasant who had come to Paris for the first time to see the sights of the city. Another friend, Louis Reybaud, added: under the country costume and good-natured attitude, there was a natural dignity of deportment and flashes of a keen intelligence, and one quickly discovered an honest heart and a generous soul. His eyes, especially, were lighted up with singular brightness and fire.

Biographer George Roche noted that the Bastiat of 1848 was far more cosmopolitan, arriving dressed in the styles of the time. More important, though his emaciated face and hollow voice betrayed the ravages of disease within him, there was something about the glitter of his dark eyes which made immediately clear to all his associates that Bastiat now possessed both the worldly experience of Parisian society and a strong sense of mission.

Claude Frederic Bastiat was born on June 30, 1801, in Bayonne, a seaport in the department of Landes in southwestern France. Bayonne was a quiet medieval town, a political backwater. His father, Pierre, worked with the family banking and export firm, which did business in Spain and Portugal. His mother, Marie-Julie Frechou, died when he was seven. After his father died two years later, Frederic moved in with his aunt Justine Bastiat and his paternal grandfather, Pierre Bastiat.
They sent him to schools in Bayonne, then to the Benedictine college of Soreze, which attracted students from Britain, Greece, Italy, Holland, Poland, Spain, and the United States, contributing to his cosmopolitan outlook. He learned English, Italian, and Spanish. He read literature and philosophy, and he played the violoncello.

When Bastiat was 17, he left Soreze to join his uncle Henry de Monclar in the same banking and export firm where his father had worked. While he didn’t want a commercial career, he was interested in the civilizing influence of commerce and the many ways that laws hurt people. He observed, for instance, how the 1816 French tariff throttled trade, resulting in empty warehouses and idle docks around Bayonne. In 1819, the government put steep tariffs on corn, meat, and sugar, making poor people suffer from needlessly high food prices. High tariffs on English and Swiss cotton led to widespread smuggling.

Jean Baptiste Say
Bastiat explored books about political economy, as economics was called. I have read the Traité d’économie politique by Jean Baptiste Say, an excellent and methodical study, he wrote a friend. Say descended from Protestants who had fled France during religious persecution. He worked for a while in Britain before joining a Paris insurance company. There his boss suggested that he read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The book thrilled him, and he resolved to learn more about how an economy works. His first literary work was a 1789 pamphlet defending freedom of the press. He co-founded a republican periodical, La Décade philosophique, which published many of his articles about economic freedom. He embraced the ideals of the French Revolution and in 1799 became a member of the governing Tribunate.

The Traité d’économie politique, Say’s major work, appeared in 1803. He reintroduced free-market views to France and Europe generally. Back before the French Revolution, Turgot and other intellectuals known as physiocrats had done much to promote economic freedom—and coined the immortal phrase laissez-faire (let us be), which became a battle cry—but these intellectuals all accepted royal absolutism. Moreover, early physiocrats thought land was the most important source of wealth, which suggested support for the landholding aristocracy. These were major reasons why they fell out of fashion after the French Revolution. As a republican, Say was in a position to help convince future generations about the importance of economic freedom. He held that the most productive economy must rest on private property, private enterprise, and private initiatives, noted Princeton University historian Robert R. Palmer in his recent intellectual biography of Say.
Say discarded Smith’s labor theory of value, insisting that value was determined by customers. Say recognized the creative role of entrepreneurs. He rejected the dark pessimism of British economist T.R. Malthus, who feared that population growth would outstrip the capacity of private food producers. Say believed free-market capitalism could achieve unlimited progress.

He viewed taxation as theft. Consider these comments: The moment that value is parted with by the tax-payer, it is positively lost to him; the moment it is consumed by the government or its agents, it is lost to all the world, and never reverts to, or re-exists in society. . . . It is a glaring absurdity to pretend, that taxation contributes to national wealth, by engrossing part of the national produce . . . seized on and devoured by taxation . . . the act of levying is always attended with mischief.
Among other things, Say’s Traité d’économie politique condemned wild government spending, military conscription, and slavery (the most shameful traffic in which human beings have ever engaged). Since Napoleon had reintroduced slavery in French Caribbean colonies, pursued imperial conquest, and spent money at a ruinous rate, it’s no wonder that Say’s book was censored. In addition, he was dismissed from the Tribunate. He turned to business and started a cotton-spinning mill which grew to employ more than 400 people.

It was Napoleon Bonaparte who popularized the word idéologue as a derisive term aimed at defenders of freedom like Say. All the misfortunes that our beautiful France has been experiencing, Napoleon declared, have to be ascribed to ideology, to that cloudy metaphysics which goes ingeniously seeking first causes. Not until after Napoleon’s downfall was it possible to bring out a revised edition; all together, there were a half-dozen editions during his life, the last in 1829. Say gave up cotton-spinning, became a professor at the College de France, and Thomas Jefferson reportedly wanted to hire him for the University of Virginia.

After meeting Say in Paris, the English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill called him the ideal type of French republican. The radical republican publicist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) remarked that Say detested at the same time the Bourbons [French royal dynasty] and Bonaparte, an apparent contradiction which filled me with astonishment.

Say inspired a new generation of French liberals devoted to laissez-faire principles. Among these was Say’s lively son-in-law Charles Comte, who, with the scholarly Charles Dunoyer (1786-1863), founded and edited Censeur européen, the most important libertarian periodical in the decade after Napoleon’s downfall. Dunoyer wrote De la liberté du travail (Freedom to work, 1825), and Comte’s Traité de legislation (Treatise on legislation) came out the following year. Comte went on to contribute articles for Revue Americaine, established by the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American and French revolutions. Dunoyer and Comte attacked the socialist doctrines of Comte de Saint-Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy) and his followers. Dunoyer and Comte opposed government interference with private property, labor markets, or trade, and they strongly believed that voluntary association and market competition were absolutely essential for human progress. Wary of violent revolution, they did their best to change the world by educating people. They discussed issues with the leading French liberals of their day, including philosopher Benjamin Constant, novelist Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), historian Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), and Belgian-born economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912).

From Say, Bastiat learned that economic freedom works better than government intervention and that he might gain influence by explaining fundamental principles. Bastiat surely must have been cheered to discover a growing community of French liberals. They displayed much deeper understanding of freedom than the better-known English economists who embraced Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism and subsequently succumbed to socialism.

“Solitary Studies”
In 1824, Bastiat dreamed of going to Paris and somehow making a difference, but his ailing grandfather asked him to live on the 617-acre family property near Mugron, a small town, and that’s what he did. I am putting aside all ambitious projects and am returning again to my solitary studies, he remarked. His grandfather died the following year, and he inherited the property. Like the early physiocrats, Bastiat promoted better farming techniques among the tenants who worked his property, but they weren’t much interested. What would you have if you had a philharmonic society composed of the deaf? he lamented. He spent most of his time with books.

Bastiat came across a copy of Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1827. He wrote a friend: I have discovered a real treasure—a small volume of the moral and political philosophy of Franklin. I am so enthusiastic about his style that I intend to adopt it as my own.

For a sounding board, he turned to his neighbor Félix Coudroy, a young lawyer who shared his passion for ideas. Coudroy, however, revered Jean Jacques Rousseau and favored socialism. Coudroy frequently read books, marked telling passages, passed the book to Bastiat, and then they talked about it. Bastiat learned a great deal about biography, history, politics, religion, and philosophy this way. Eventually, he converted Coudroy to classical liberalism. They were to be close friends for two decades.

Around 1830, Bastiat decided I would like a wife. He married one Marie Hiard but, as biographer Louis Baudin noted, He left the bride at the church after the wedding and continued to live as a bachelor. Somehow, a son was born, but his wife continued to live with her parents.

On July 26, 1830, King Charles X suspended freedom of the press, dissolved the French Chamber of Deputies, took away the right to vote from middle-class people, and called for new elections in which only aristocrats could participate—a scheme to restore royal absolutism. This triggered a revolution, and after three days of upheaval, he abdicated. The revered Marquis de Lafayette threw his support behind Louis Philippe, who, though related to the long-ruling Bourbon dynasty, agreed to serve as a Citizen King. He stood astride a moderate, middle-class regime which was corrupted by power as the aristocracy had been corrupted before. Louis-Philippe’s chief minister Francois Guizot encouraged people to Enrichissez vous, enrichissez vous (enrich yourselves).

Bastiat began to play a minor role in public affairs. Soon after the 1830 Revolution, he was appointed a justice of the peace in Mugron, and he was elected to the General Council of Landes. While traveling through Spain and Portugal, he again witnessed the folly of trade restrictions, which kept people poor.

Bastiat submitted an article to the Journal des économistes, and although the editors had rejected his previous submissions they published this one in October 1844. The article made a case that tariffs were bad for both Britain and France, and it caused a sensation. The article inspired congratulatory letters from Charles Dunoyer and from Michel Chevalier (1806-1879), who was an economics professor at the College de France. Chevalier had favored the ideas of the socialist Saint-Simon and the authoritarian Joseph de Maistre. As Chevalier biographer Marlis Steinert noted, He read Bastiat, and he was converted.

Cobden and Bright
While going through some London newspapers, Bastiat was thrilled to read about how textile entrepreneurs Richard Cobden and John Bright led the Anti-Corn-Law League, a crusade for free trade. Bastiat began gathering material for a book on the Anti-Corn-Law League, and he started corresponding with Cobden. The Englishman was then about 40, and according to a friend, he could often be seen half skipping along a pavement, or a railway platform, with the lightness of a slim and dapper figure, and a mind full bent upon its object.

In July, Bastiat crossed the English Channel to see Cobden. They told me that Cobden was on the point of starting for Manchester, Bastiat wrote a friend, and that he was most likely preparing for the journey at that moment. . . . I hurried to Cobden’s house, where I found him, and we had a conversation which lasted for two hours. He understands French very well, speaks it a little, and I understand his English. I explained the state of opinion in France, the results that I expect from my book, and so on.

According to biographer John Morley, Cobden told Bastiat that he ought to take up his quarters at the hotel of the League, and to spend his evenings there in listening to the fireside talk of [Cobden's compatriot] Mr. Bright and the rest of the band. A day or two afterwards, at Cobden’s solicitation, Bastiat went down to Manchester. His wonder at the ingenious methods and the prodigious scale of the League increased with all that he saw. His admiration for Cobden as a public leader grew into hearty affection for him as a private friend, and this friendship became one of the chief delights of the few busy years of life that remained to him.

Bastiat’s book Cobden et la Ligue scooped all other French journalists. He was the first Frenchman to talk about the English free trade movement that soon reached a climax when Parliament, in June 1846, approved a bill to begin repealing grain tariffs. This marked a dramatic departure from traditional tariff negotiations based on the principle of reciprocity: one nation would cut tariffs only if another nation would make comparable concessions. Tariff negotiations tended to be slow, unproductive, and acrimonious. Cobden and Bright persuaded Parliament to unilaterally abolish grain tariffs without asking concessions from any nation, including France, which had fought England through many bitter wars. Cobden and Bright had made a compelling case that free trade would benefit England, especially poor people who needed access to cheap food, even if other nations kept their borders closed. Moreover, they maintained, unilateral free trade would contribute to international peace by taking politics out of trade, reducing the risk that economic disputes might escalate into political and military conflicts. Unilateral free trade was a bold gesture for goodwill among nations.

Economic Sophisms
Bastiat wrote a series of articles for Journal des économistes, attacking the fallacies of protectionism. For instance, the fallacy that tariffs would mean high living standards, that labor-saving machinery destroys jobs, that tariffs are needed to maintain economic independence and national security. Bastiat viewed everything from the standpoint of consumers. His essays were lucid, dramatic, insightful, often amusing satires. He gathered 22 of the essays in a book, Sophismes économiques (Economic Sophisms), which appeared in late 1845. A second volume of 17 essays appeared three years later. They were translated into English and Italian.

Bastiat’s wit is on display in An Immense Discovery: There are men lying in wait along the whole length of the frontier, armed to the teeth and charged with the task of putting difficulties in the way of transporting goods from one country to another. They are called customs officials. They act in exactly the same way as the mud and the ruts. They delay and impede commerce; they contribute to the difference that we have noted between the price paid by the consumer and the price received by the producer.

Bastiat’s most famous satire was his A Petition, in which candlemakers appealed to the French Chamber of Deputies for protection against an insidious competitor. We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly that we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion [England]. . . .

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s eyes, deadlights, and blinds—in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses. . . .
In late 1845, the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce took a step toward free trade by urging that France and Belgium form a customs union, and Bastiat was asked to help. He wrote articles for a Bordeaux newspaper and he delivered speeches aimed at encouraging France to go beyond a customs union and pursue free trade with people everywhere.

Mindful that the English free trade movement had been launched in a regional city—Manchester—Bastiat helped form the Association bordelaise pour la liberté des échanges (Bordeaux Association for Free Trade) on February 23, 1846. Cobden had gone national after a regional free trade association was underway, and Bastiat adopted the same strategy. He went to Paris and launched the Association pour la liberté des échanges (Free trade association) on May 10, 1846. Among those who helped Bastiat were Auguste Blanqui, Michel Chevalier, Charles Dunoyer, Gustave de Molinari, and Jean Baptiste Say’s son Horace. On August 18, they kicked off their campaign with a dinner featuring Richard Cobden. The French free trade association held a succession of public meetings in Paris at Montesquieu Hall, named after the eighteenth-century French philosopher who had advocated a separation of government powers.

I cherish all forms of freedom, Bastiat subsequently wrote Cobden, and first among them that freedom which is the most universally beneficial to all men, which they enjoy every minute of the day and under all circumstances of their lives—freedom of labor and freedom of exchange. I realize that the right to possess the fruits of one’s toil is the keystone of society and even of human life. I realize that exchange is implicit in the idea of property, and that restrictions on exchange shake the foundations of our right to own anything.

In another letter to Cobden, Bastiat made clear he recognized how much was at stake in the fight for free trade: Rather than the fact of free trade alone, I desire for my country the general philosophy of free trade. While free trade itself will bring more wealth to us, the acceptance of the general philosophy that underlies free trade will inspire all needed reforms.

Bastiat encouraged others to organize free trade associations in Marseilles and Lyons. He reported to Cobden: Unquestionably, we are making progress. Six months ago, we didn’t have even one newspaper for us. Today we have five in Paris, three in Bordeaux, two in Marseilles, one in Le Havre, and two in Bayonne.

Le Libre-Échange
On November 29, Bastiat began publishing Le Libre-Echange, a four-to-eight-page weekly free trade newspaper. Free trade! Bastiat exulted, It is a phrase that will level the mountains. . . . Do you imagine that we have organized ourselves to get some small reduction in tariffs? Never. We demand for all of our fellow citizens, not only freedom to work but also freedom to exchange the fruits of their work.

Bastiat was an inspiration for people who organized free trade associations in Belgium, Spain, and Italy. He also had an impact on intellectuals in Germany. The Englishman John Prince Smith (1809-1874), who had gone to Prussia and become a citizen, was influenced by Bastiat, and widely promoted free trade ideas. As historian Ralph Raico notes, Prince Smith worked at disseminating good translations of the works of Frédéric Bastiat and in gathering about him a circle of like-minded enthusiasts.

During 1847, Bastiat advised Cobden that free trade was only the first step toward promoting solid peace with France. The policy taken by you and your friends in Parliament will have an immense influence on the course of our undertaking. If you energetically disarm your diplomacy, if you succeed in reducing your naval forces, we shall be strong. If not, what kind of figure shall we cut before our public? When we predict that Free Trade will draw English policy into the way of justice, peace, economy, colonial emancipation, France is not bound to take our word for it. There exists an inveterate mistrust of England, I will even say a sentiment of hostility, as old as the two names of French and English. . . . England ought to bring her political system into harmony with her new economic system.

Cobden and Bastiat collaborated on many things. On one occasion, for instance, Cobden wrote: My first speech . . . cost me a good deal of time with the aid of Bastiat to write and prepare to read it. My good friend Bastiat has been two mornings with me in my room, translating and teaching, before eight o’clock.

Bastiat continued to do the lion’s share of organizing work in France. He wrote Coudroy: My friend, I am not only the Association, I am the Association entirely. While I have zealous and devoted collaborators, they are interested only in speaking and writing. As for the organization and administration of this vast machine, I am alone.

Unfortunately, while entrenched interest groups aggressively defended French tariffs and import prohibitions, there wasn’t any interest group willing to back free trade. I am losing all my time, he wrote Coudroy, the association is progressing at a turtle’s pace. The lack of money and social connections discouraged Bastiat, as he admitted to Cobden: I suffer from my poverty; yes, instead of running from one to the other on foot, dirtied up to my back, in order to meet only one or two of them a day and obtain only evasive or weak responses, I would like to be able to unite them at my table in a rich salon, then the difficulties would be gone! Ah, it is neither the heart nor the head that I lack, but I feel that this superb Babylon is not my place and that it is necessary that I return to my solitude.
In 1847, the French government debated a bill which would abolish about half of the French tariffs, but protectionist lobbyists killed it, and the free traders never recovered. Bastiat wrote Cobden: Our adversaries are full of audacity and ardor. Our friends, on the contrary, have become discouraged and indifferent. What good does it do to be a thousand times right if we can’t get anyone to listen. The tactics of the protectionists, concurred in by the newspapers, are to ignore us completely. The French free trade association held its last public meeting on March 15, 1848, and Le Libre Echange ceased publication after the April 16 issue.

Reform of the corrupt government had become the hottest political issue, and the situation had reached a climax on February 21, 1848, when National Guards shot about 20 republican demonstrators in Paris. Suddenly, the city exploded into revolution. The king abdicated three days later, and the Chamber of Deputies proclaimed France a republic. Ten republican leaders, including the socialist Louis Blanc, headed a provisional government that would run things until the election of a Constituent Assembly. Blanc demanded a Ministry of Progress, nationalization of industry, and national workshops. The workshops, a make-work scheme for socialists and the unemployed, were set up, and by mid-June they had some 120,000 people working mostly on roads.

Amidst the upheaval, Bastiat published about a dozen issues of La République francaise, a two-page periodical defending libertarian principles. He insisted that people must be secure in all rights, those of the conscience as well as those of intelligence; those of property, like those of work; those of the family as those of the commune; those of the country as those of humanity. I have no other ideal than universal justice; no other banner than that of our flag: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Election as Deputy
Just as Cobden had become convinced that he would be more effective working within Parliament and stirring up popular support for libertarian principles, Bastiat concluded he must try to influence the Constituent Assembly. In April 1848, with universal manhood suffrage, he was elected a Deputy from Landes. Then on May 15, disgruntled welfare recipients from the national workshops invaded the hall where the Constituent Assembly met and drove out the deputies. National Guards crushed the rebels, and the Constituent Assembly declared martial law and proceeded to dismantle the national workshops. During the Bloody June Days (June 24-26), an estimated 20,000 armed socialists from the national workshops fought for power, but backed by the National Guards, the Constituent Assembly got tough. Some 10,000 people were killed or wounded, and another 11,000 were imprisoned.

For several weeks, Bastiat issued a two-page revolutionary paper, the daily Jacques Bonhomme, edited by Charles Coquelin and Gustave de Molinari. Bastiat recognized that revolutionary violence occurred not because there was too much freedom but because there wasn’t enough. Can we imagine citizens, otherwise completely free, he wrote to Félix Coudroy, moving to overthrow their government when its activity is limited to satisfying the most vital, the most keenly felt of all social wants, the need for justice? We have tried so many things; when shall we try the simplest of all: freedom?

Bastiat produced articles for the Journal des Economistes, Journal des Débats, Courrier francais, Journal du Havre, Courrier de Marseille, Sentinelle des Pyrénées and others. He contributed two essays to the Dictionnaire de l’Economie politique (Dictionary of Political Economy), which Ambrose Clement, Charles Coquelin, Horace Say, Gustave de Molinari, and others developed as a means to popularize free-market ideas. Moreover, Bastiat wrote letters for the opposition press, including l’Epoque, Journal de Lille, Minoteur industriel, la Presse, and Voix de Peuple (where, through 14 remarkable letters, Bastiat debated the bombastic socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon). Professor Dean Russell is convinced that Bastiat took the lead exposing the fallacies of socialism.
Bastiat ridiculed claims that government could increase the total number of productive jobs. The state opens a road, builds a palace, repairs a street, digs a canal; with these projects it gives jobs to certain workers. That is what is seen. But it deprives certain other laborers of employment. That is what is not seen. . . . do millions of francs descend miraculously on a moonbeam into the coffers of [politicians]? For the process to be complete, does not the state have to organize the collection of funds as well as their expenditure? Does it not have to get its tax collectors into the country and its taxpayers to make their contributions?

When, in the name of compassion, socialists demanded more powerful government, Bastiat fired away with tough questions: Is there in the heart of man only what the legislator has put there? Did fraternity have to make its appearance on earth by way of the ballot box? Does the law forbid you to practice charity simply because all that it imposes on you is the obligation to practice justice? Are we to believe that women will cease to be self-sacrificing and that pity will no longer find a place in their hearts because self-sacrifice and pity will not be commanded by the law?

Bastiat warned socialism must mean slavery, because the state will be the arbiter, the master, of all destinies. It will take a great deal; hence, a great deal will remain for itself. It will multiply the number of its agents; it will enlarge the scope of its prerogatives; it will end by acquiring overwhelming proportions.

The Constituent Assembly decided France must have a strong president—even before it had finished drafting a new constitution! The candidates included a vague idealist, a watered-down socialist, a tough law-and-order man, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who mainly traded on his name as conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. Twice Louis Napoleon had attempted to seize power (Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840), for which he spent some time in prison. He wrote an anticapitalist tract and appealed to people who looked back nostalgically on Napoleon Bonaparte’s wars. In December 1848, he easily won election as French President.

Legislative Assembly
The Constituent Assembly concluded its business in May 1849 and was succeeded by the Legislative Assembly. Bastiat was elected a deputy. As member of the Budget Commission and vice president of the Assembly’s powerful Finance Committee, he urged lower government spending, lower taxes, and free trade.

The following month there was an attempted socialist rebellion which brought widespread support for repressive measures. Again and again, Bastiat voted to defend civil liberties. He opposed a bill banning voluntary labor unions. He voted against imposing martial law. When his socialist enemy Louis Blanc was charged with inciting an insurrection, Bastiat voted to acquit him. Even Proudhon had to acknowledge that Bastiat is devoted, body and soul, to the Republic, to liberty, to equality, to progress; he has clearly proved that many times with his vote in the Assembly.

Bastiat was discouraged. He remarked that while the French people have been in advance of all other nations in the conquest of their rights, or rather of their political guarantees, they have nonetheless remained the most governed, regimented, administered, imposed upon, shackled, and exploited of all.
Here I am in my solitude, he lamented. Would that I could bury myself here forever, and work out peacefully this economic synthesis which I have in my head, and which will never leave it! For, unless there occur some sudden change in public opinion, I am about to be sent to Paris charged with the terrible mandate of a Representative of the People. If I had health and strength, I should accept this mission with enthusiasm. But what can my feeble voice, my sickly and nervous constitution, accomplish in the midst of revolutionary tempests?

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Bastiat needed a lot of rest to preserve his health, but he kept at it. I rise at six o’clock, dress, shave, breakfast, and read the newspapers, he told Felix Coudroy. This occupies me till seven, or half-past seven. About nine, I am obliged to go out, for at ten commences the sitting of the Committee of Finance, of which I am a member. It continues till one, and then the public sitting begins, and continues till seven. I return to dinner, and it very rarely happens that there are not after-dinner meetings of Sub-Committees charged with special questions. The only hour at my disposal is from eight to nine in the morning, and it is at that hour that I receive visitors. . . . I am profoundly disgusted with this kind of life.

The Law
In June 1850, Bastiat returned to Mugron and produced one of his most beloved works, The Law. He affirmed the natural rights philosophy, the most powerful intellectual defense of liberty which, except for the American abolitionist movement, had virtually vanished from the English-speaking world. It is not because men have passed laws that personality, liberty, and property exist, he declared. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property already exist that men make laws. . . . Each of us certainly gets from Nature, from God, the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since they are the three elements constituting or sustaining life, elements which are mutually complementary and which cannot be understood without one another. For what are our faculties, if not an extension of our personality, and what is property, if not an extension of our faculties?. . . . Law is the organization of the natural right to legitimate self-defense.

Bastiat went on to attack what he called legal plunder—laws which exploit some people to benefit politically connected interests. He described how such laws tend to politicize private life: It is in the nature of men to react against the inequity of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by the law for the profit of the classes who make it, all the plundered classes seek, by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter into the making of the laws. And once again, Bastiat demonstrated vivid understanding of what socialism was all about: socialists consider mankind as raw material to be fitted into various social molds . . . inert matter, receiving from the power of the government life, organization, morality and wealth.

In The Law, Bastiat celebrated liberty, whose name alone has the power to stir all hearts and set the world to shaking . . . freedom of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of movement, of labor, of exchange; in other words, the freedom of everyone to use all his faculties in a peaceful way; in still other words, the destruction of all forms of despotism, even of legal despotism, and the restriction of the law to its sole rational function, that is, of regulating the right of the individual to legitimate self-defense.

Bastiat plunged into his next work, Les Harmonies économiques (Economic Harmonies). He expanded on a cherished theme, that free people cooperate peacefully and gain the benefits of voluntary exchange. Men’s interests, he wrote, left to themselves, tend to form harmonious combinations and to work together for progress and the general good.

The book reflected both his deep pessimism and fervent optimism. We see plunder usurping the citizens’ liberty in order the more readily to exploit their wealth, and draining off their substance the better to conquer their liberty, he wrote. Private enterprise becomes public enterprise. Everything is done by government functionaries; a stupid and vexatious bureaucracy swarms over the land. The public treasury becomes a vast reservoir into which those who work pour their earnings, so that the henchmen of the government may tap them as they will.

Yet Bastiat never gave up. Oh liberty! he cried. We have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by conquest, nigh unto death in servitude, jeered at in the courts of the mighty, driven from the schools, mocked in the drawing room, misinterpreted in the studio, anathematized in the temple. . . . But if thou shouldst surrender in this last haven, what becomes of the hope of the ages and of the dignity of man? The first volume of Harmonies économiques was published in late 1850, and he never finished the work.

By August 1850, Bastiat’s tuberculosis worsened. He wrote Cobden lamenting these unfortunate lungs, which are to me very capricious servants. I have returned a little better, but afflicted with a disease of the larynx, accompanied with a complete extinction of voice. The doctor enjoins absolute silence; and, in consequence, I am about to pass two months in the country, near Paris.

Doctors ordered Bastiat to Italy. In his last letter to Félix Coudroy, from Rome, he wrote: Here I am in the Eternal City, but not much disposed to visit its marvels. . . . I should desire only one thing, to be relieved of the acute pain which the disease of the windpipe occasions. This continuity of suffering torments me. Every meal is a punishment. To eat, drink, speak, cough are all painful operations. Walking fatigues me—carriage airings irritate the throat—I can no longer work, or even read, seriously. You see to what I am reduced. I shall soon be little better than a dead body, retaining only the faculty of suffering. When he was too ill to write, he asked his friend P. Paillottet to tell Michel Chevalier how grateful I am for his excellent review of my book (Harmonies économiques).
On Tuesday, December 24, 1850, Bastiat was in bed, and Paillottet remarked that his eye sparkled with that peculiar expression which I had frequently noticed in our conversations, and which announced the solution of a problem. Bastiat uttered two words: la vérité (the truth). He took his last breath a few minutes after five in the afternoon. He was only 49. His cousin, the priest Eugene de Monclar, was at his side. Two days later, there was a funeral service at Rome’s Saint-Louis des Francais church, and he was buried in the adjacent cemetery.

He had done much to expand the ranks of French classical liberals. The Paris group, as intellectual historian Joseph Schumpeter called them, controlled the Journal des économistes, the new dictionary, the central professional organization in Paris, the College de France, and other institutions as well as most of the publicity—so much so that their political or scientific opponents began to suffer from a persecution complex.

Bastiat’s Influence on Michel Chevalier
Bastiat’s most important single influence was probably on Michel Chevalier. Until 1845, noted historian J.B. Duroselle, Michel Chevalier was a moderate protectionist. Then in April of 1846, he published his profession of faith as a free trader in an article in the Journal des Débats. How can that evolution be explained? I believe it can be attributed almost entirely to the intellectual influence of Frédéric Bastiat.

In 1852, Chevalier published Examen du systeme commercial connu sous le nom de systeme protecteur (Examination of the Commercial System known as Protectionism). He often drew from Bastiat. For instance, he noted that To demonstrate the evil effects of protectionism, I will cite an argument by Bastiat. . . . In one of his excellent pamphlets, Bastiat proposed to show that the principle of protectionism and communism is the same.

Chevalier gained influence in the French government and used it to promote free trade. After the 1855 Industrial Exposition, he declared that French industry was so competitive it didn’t need tariff protection anymore. He persuaded the Emperor and the Council of State to introduce a free trade bill in the national assembly, but it was shot down. In 1856, Cobden offered Chevalier some encouragement: I am pleased indeed that you are carrying on the defense of the principles of free trade, for since the untimely death of our dear friend Bastiat, it is you whom we regard as the champion of free trade.

Chevalier began thinking that trade might be liberalized via the French emperor’s treaty-making power. In 1859, he visited England to seek Cobden’s support for a trade treaty between England and France. He talked with Chancellor of the Exchequer William Ewart Gladstone. Cobden took the lead in negotiations. Although the resulting treaty left many tariffs at 30 percent, it abolished all French import prohibitions, and many tariffs were cut. The treaty marked a momentous breakthrough. Despite the predictable outrage from special interests, France went on to negotiate trade liberalization treaties with Austria-Hungary, German states, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Moreover, the most-favored-nation principle became widely adopted—whenever a nation negotiates lower import barriers in a new treaty, the benefits will be extended to everyone else with whom that nation has a trade treaty.

Biographer P. Ronce remarked that If the free trade campaign [which Bastiat spearheaded from 1845-1850] did not bring an immediate result, at least it accustomed people to the idea of free trade, and it brought serious doubts about the benefits of protection; it prepared the way for the ‘qualified’ free trade system represented by the Treaty of Commerce of 1860.

Richard Cobden offered this tribute: My enthusiasm for Bastiat, founded as much on a love of his personal qualities as on an admiration for his genius, dates back nearly twenty years. . . . The works of Bastiat, which are selling not only in France, but throughout Europe, are gradually teaching those who by their commanding talents are capable of becoming the teachers of others; for Bastiat speaks with the greatest force to the highest order of intellects. At the same time, he is almost the only Political Economist whose style is brilliant and fascinating, whilst his irresistible logic is relieved by sallies of wit and humor which makes his Sophisms as amusing as a novel. His fame is so well established that I think it would be presumptuous to do anything to increase it by any other means than the silent but certain dissemination of his works by the force of their own great merits.
Bastiat’s seven-volume Oeuvres completes (complete works) appeared between 1861 and 1864. There continued to be French interest in classical liberalism, as evidenced by a succession of books about Bastiat: A.B. Belle’s Bastiat et le Libre-Echange (Bastiat and Free Trade, 1878), Edouard Bondurand’s Frédéric Bastiat (1879), Alphonse Courtois’s Journal des Economistes (1888), A. D. Fouville’s Frédéric Bastiat (1888), C.H. Brunel’s Bastiat et la reaction contre le pessimisme économique (Bastiat and the reaction against pessimistic economics, 1901) and G. de Nouvion’s Frédéric Bastiat, Sa Vie, Ses Oeuvres, Ses Doctrines (Frédéric Bastiat, his life, work and doctrines, 1905). The glorious French laissez-faire tradition passed into history with the death of Bastiat’s friend Gustave de Molinari on January 28, 1912, although Molinari influenced American individualists like Benjamin Tucker, whose radical ideas persist to this day.

Bastiat in the Twentieth Century
Most twentieth-century academics banished Bastiat’s name from serious discussion. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, wrote that he might have gone down to posterity as the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived—were it not for Bastiat’s Les Harmonies économiques, which ventured into economic theory. I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist, Schumpeter sniffed, I hold that he was no theorist. In their History of Economic Doctrines, Charles Gide and Charles Rist remarked that It is easy to laugh . . . and to show that such supposed harmony of interests between men does not exist.

A few scholars did acknowledge Bastiat’s contributions. Economist John A. Hobson called Bastiat the most brilliant exponent of the sheer logic of Free Trade in this or any other country. The respected economic historian John H. Clapham hailed Bastiat for the best series of popular free trade arguments ever written . . . the text-book for controversialists of his school throughout Europe. The scholarly 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1913) offered these stirring words: He alone fought socialism hand to hand, body to body, as it were, not caricaturing it, not denouncing it, not criticizing under its name some merely abstract theory, but taking it as actually presented by its most popular representatives, considering patiently their proposals and arguments, and proving conclusively that they proceeded on false principles, reasoned badly and sought to realize generous aims by foolish and harmful means. Nowhere will reason find a richer armoury of weapons available against socialism than in the pamphlets published by Bastiat. . . .

In 1946, former Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce General Manager Leonard E. Read established the Foundation for Economic Education and resolved to make Bastiat’s work better known. He persuaded economics scholar Dean Russell to prepare a new translation of The Law. Over the years, it has sold several hundred thousand copies. Russell went on to earn his Ph.D. under famed free-market economist Wilhelm Ropke at the University of Geneva, writing his dissertation on Bastiat. Russell adapted this into Frederic Bastiat, Ideas and Influence (1965), which remains the best single book on him.

Meanwhile, New York Times editorial writer Henry Hazlitt produced a book with the audacious title Economics in One Lesson (1946). My greatest debt, Hazlitt acknowledged, is Frederic Bastiat’s essay, ‘What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,’ now nearly a century old. The present work may, in fact, be regarded as a modernization, extension and generalization of the approach found in Bastiat’s pamphlet. Economics in One Lesson has sold an estimated one million copies.

Recent evidence dramatically affirms Bastiat’s most fundamental view that government is the primary source of chronic violence and that a free society tends to be peaceful. Respected political scientist R.J. Rummel, who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, analyzed almost 8,200 estimates of deaths from domestic violence, war, genocide, and mass murder. In his 1995 book Death by Government, he reported that throughout history, governments have murdered more than 300 million people—not counting war deaths. In his 1997 book Power Kills, Rummel surveyed experience of the past 180 years and reported that he didn’t find a single case of war between two democratic governments with limited power. Moreover, there were decidedly fewer civil wars and other types of domestic violence in nations with limited-power democratic governments.

And so that frail Frenchman whose public career spanned just six years, belittled as a mere popularizer, dismissed as a dreamer and an ideologue, turns out to have been right. Even before Karl Marx began scribbling The Communist Manifesto in December 1847, Frederic Bastiat knew that socialism is doomed. Marx called for a vast expansion of government power to seize privately owned land, banks, railroads, and schools, but Bastiat warned that government power is a mortal enemy, and he was right. He declared that prosperity is everywhere the work of free people, and he was right again. He maintained that the only meaningful way to secure peace is to secure human liberty by limiting government power, and he was right yet again. Bastiat took the lead, he stood alone when he had to, he displayed a generous spirit, he shared epic insights, he gave wings to ideas, and he committed his life for liberty. He earned his place among the immortals.
Jim Powell
Jim Powell
Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/American Heritage and other publications, and is author of six books.

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