Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (; ; 30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850) was a French economist, writer, and prominent member of the French liberal school.
A member of the French National Assembly, Bastiat developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced the parable of the broken window. He was described as "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" by economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter.
As an advocate of classical economics and the economics of Adam Smith, his views favored a free market and influenced the Austrian School. He is best known for his book The Law, where he argued that law must protect rights such as private property, not "plunder" others' property.
Biography
thumb|left|upright|Drawing of Bastiat
Bastiat was born on 29 June 1801 in Bayonne, Gascony (Aquitaine), a port town in the south of France on the Bay of Biscay. His grandfather Pierre Bastiat (1742–1825) had come to trade in Bayonne from the inland town of Mugron in the wine-growing region of Chalosse and the Landes department, married Bastiat's grandmother Catherine Laulhé (also from the Chalosse) in 1770. Having armed a frigate at his own expense for the War of the Pyrenees in 1793 to improve his standing with the Republic, Pierre Bastiat acquired the estate of Sengresse (just north of Mugron), confiscated during the French Revolution from the house of Béthune-Chârost, at an auction on 9 June 1795, in the closing stages of the war, and made it his family's residence. The bourgeois prosperity launched by Bayonne's new status as a free port from 1784 was cut short by the dissolution of the town's chamber of commerce in 1791, the ensuing wars with Spain (1793–1795, 1807–1814), and the Continental Blockade (1806–1814); He started his education with abbé Meilhan in Bayonne and attended the college in Saint-Sever, before in 1815 he was enrolled by his family at the Benedictine boarding school near Castres (a royal military college, granted lycée status in 1813 and admitting Protestants), where he studied philosophy along with English, Spanish and Italian.
After the middle-class July Revolution of 1830, Bastiat became politically active and circulated a pamphlet addressed to the Landes constituents on the occasion of the legislative election of that year, in which he criticised government taxation and appealed to the individual rationality of voters on behalf of the general interest. He was elected justice of the peace of Mugron in 1831 and to the Council General (county-level assembly) of Landes in 1832. He was elected to the national legislative assembly after the French Revolution of 1848.
thumb|Bastiat's tomb in [[San Luigi dei Francesi, a Catholic church in Rome]]
Bastiat contracted tuberculosis, probably during his tours throughout France to promote his ideas, and the illness eventually prevented him from making further speeches (particularly at the legislative assembly to which he was elected in 1848 and 1849) and cut his life short. In The Law, he wrote: "Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)".</blockquote>
His first published works were two short treatises on the winemaking industry of the Landes, Le fisc et la vigne (1841) and Mémoire sur la question vinicole (1843), in which he blamed excessive taxation for the regional industry's crisis.
Among his better-known works is Economic Sophisms, a series of essays (originally published in the Journal des économistes), which contain a defence of free trade. Bastiat wrote the work while living in England to advise the shapers of the French Republic on perils to avoid. Economic Sophisms was translated and adapted for an American readership in 1867 by economist and historian of money Alexander del Mar, writing under the pseudonym Emile Walter.
Economic Sophisms and the candlemakers' petition
The work, addressed to "the Good People" as an argument for free trade, has been characterised as an "equivalent of Economics 101 for freshmen". Contained within Economic Sophisms is the satirical parable known as the candlemakers' petition in which candlemakers and tallow producers lobby the Chamber of Deputies of the French July Monarchy (1830–1848) to block out the Sun to prevent its unfair competition with their products. Also included in the Sophisms is a facetious petition to the king asking for a law forbidding the usage of everyone's right hand, based on a presumption by some of his contemporaries that more difficulty means more work and more work means more wealth.
The Law (1850)
Bastiat's most famous work is his book The Law (), originally published as a pamphlet in 1850. It defines a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. In The Law, Bastiat wrote that everyone has a right to protect "his person, his liberty, and his property". The state should be only a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. According to Bastiat, justice (meaning defense of one's life, liberty, and property) has precise limits, but if government power extends further into philanthropic endeavors, then government becomes so limitless that it can grow endlessly. The resulting statism is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator". The public then becomes socially engineered by the legislator and must bend to the legislators' will "like the clay to the potter", saying: <blockquote>Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then, the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then, the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then, they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes.</blockquote>
Bastiat posits that the law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense (of his life, liberty, and property) in favor of another's right to legalized plunder, which he defines as "if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime" in which he includes the tax support of "protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits, guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works". According to Bastiat, legal plunder can be committed in "an infinite number of ways. Thus, we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism". Bastiat also made the following humorous point: "If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"
"What is Seen and What is not Seen"
In his 1850 essay "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ("What is seen and what is not seen"), Bastiat introduced through the parable of the broken window the concept of opportunity cost in all but name. This term was not coined until over 60 years after his death by Friedrich von Wieser in 1914.
Debate with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Bastiat famously engaged in a debate between 1849 and 1850 with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon about the legitimacy of interest. As Robert Leroux argued, Bastiat had the conviction that Proudhon's anti-interest doctrine "was the complete antithesis of any serious approach". Proudhon famously lost his temper and resorted to personal attacks: "Your intelligence is asleep, or rather it has never been awake. You are a man for whom logic does not exist. You do not hear anything, you do not understand anything. You are without philosophy, without science, without humanity. Your ability to reason, like your ability to pay attention and make comparisons, is zero. Scientifically, Mr. Bastiat, you are a dead man."
Views
Bastiat's support for free trade and denunciation of protectionism, which he associated with the Continental Blockade, was shaped by the vicissitudes of his family's international trading firm, in which he took an active role from 1818 to 1825.
Bastiat was a strong supporter of free trade who was inspired by and routinely corresponded with Richard Cobden and the English Anti-Corn Law League and worked with free-trade associations in France.
Bastiat reiterated his commitment to Christianity in his letters to Victor Calmètes of 1820–1821, where he described religion as a comforting source of morality beyond all error, and in his 1850 Harmonies of Political Economy, which he wrote was "pervaded" by his belief in God. His notion of a natural harmony between "true" socio-economic interests of individuals received praise from Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci in 1877, a year before Pecci's election to papacy as Leo XIII. He was also cited as a key influence by the US president Ronald Reagan on the latter's accession in 1981.