Frédéric Bastiat: life, ideas and books

Life

Frédéric Bastiat was born in Bayonne, France, in 1801, and worked early in life in his family's international trading firm before living as a gentleman farmer at Mugron. He was elected a justice of the peace in 1831 and a member of the departmental council of the Landes in 1832. Influenced by Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law League, he became a leading French advocate of free trade, writing for the Journal des économistes.

After the revolution of 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly for the Landes and served there until his death. He died of tuberculosis in Rome on December 24, 1850, aged forty-nine, and is buried at San Luigi dei Francesi.

Ideas

Bastiat argued that protective tariffs and other privileges enrich a favoured few at the expense of everyone else, and he used humour and parable to show it, as in his satirical petition of the candle-makers asking for protection from the sun. His best-known device, in "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" (1850), distinguishes the visible, immediate effects of a policy from the hidden effects that follow. The broken-window parable, in which breaking a window seems to stimulate trade but costs the owner the other purchase he would have made, is an early statement of opportunity cost.

In The Law (1850) he held that law exists to protect life, liberty and property, and he condemned what he called legal plunder: the use of the state's force to take from some and give to others. Economic Harmonies (1850), left unfinished, set out a view that the interests of people in a free market are harmonious.

Major works

• Economic Sophisms (essays, 1840s).
• "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" (1850).
• The Law (1850).
• Economic Harmonies (1850).

Why conservatives read him

Bastiat's short essays are among the most readable arguments for free trade and limited government, and they are frequently reprinted by think tanks and used in introductory teaching. The clarity of The Law has made it a staple of libertarian and conservative reading lists, and it is cited by economists such as Henry Hazlitt, whose Economics in One Lesson openly extends the logic of the broken window.

Joseph Schumpeter called him the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived, and the Austrian school writers Ludwig von Mises and others saw him as an anticipator of their ideas. Ronald Reagan cited him as an influence. Bastiat was not a conservative in the Burkean sense, and he sat on the left side of the French Assembly, but his case against concentrated state power and privilege belongs to the same family of arguments as Adam Smith's and speaks to modern debates about trade, subsidies and the growth of government.