Bastiat

There’s no documented evidence that the great 19 century free thinker Frederic Bastiat penned or spoke the previous line, but it doesn’t really matter whether he did or didn’t.

As French economist and author Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his book, “The Law,” in 1850, “You would oppose law to socialism.

Bastiat accompanied him and cared for him.

Bastiat also explains in The Law why his opinion is that the law cannot defend life, liberty, and property if it promotes socialist policies.

Bastiat demonstrates that this situation benefits both countries' consumers because it reduces the cost of shipping goods, and therefore reduces the price at market for those goods.

By "value," Bastiat apparently means market value; he emphasizes that this is quite different from utility.

Economist Murray Rothbard wrote that "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.

His father, Pierre Bastiat, was a prominent businessman in the town.

In his Economic Harmonies, Bastiat states that, We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature.

Living in Paris during the 1840s, he participated with the Ligue pour la Liberté des Échanges (Free Trade League), based on the theories of Frédéric Bastiat.

On his death bed in 1850, Bastiat described Molinari as the continuator of his works.

The Bastiat estate in Mugron had been acquired during the French Revolution and had previously belonged to the Marquis of Poyanne.

The next year, when Bastiat was 24, his grandfather died, leaving the young man the family estate, thereby providing him with the means to further his theoretical inquiries.

This transformation of private property into the communal domain, Bastiat points out, does not imply that private property will ever totally disappear.