Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”. Bastiat Frédéric

3. The Two Axes

       4. The Lower Council of Labor

       5. High Prices and Low Prices

       6. To Artisans and Workers

       7. A Chinese Tale

       8. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

       9. Theft by Subsidy

       10. The Tax Collector

       11. The Utopian

       12. Salt, the Mail, and the Customs Service

       13. Protection, or the Three Municipal Magistrates

       14. Something Else

       15. The Free Trader’s Little Arsenal

       16. The Right Hand and the Left Hand

       17. Domination through Work

      Economic Sophisms “Third Series,”

       1. Recipes for Protectionism

       2. Two Principles

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       3. M. Cunin-Gridaine’s Logic

       4. One Profit versus Two Losses

       5. On Moderation

       6. The People and the Bourgeoisie

       7. Two Losses versus One Profit

       8. The Political Economy of the Generals

       9. A Protest

       10. The Spanish Association for the Defense of National Employment and the Bidassoa Bridge

       11. The Specialists

       12. The Man Who Asked Embarrassing Questions

       13. The Fear of a Word

       14. Anglomania, Anglophobia

       15. One Man’s Gain Is Another Man’s Loss

       16. Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill

       17. A Little Manual for Consumers; in Other Words, for Everyone

       18. The Mayor of Énios

       19. Antediluvian Sugar

       20. Monita Secreta: The Secret Book of Instructions

       21. The Immediate Relief of the People

       22. A Disastrous Remedy

       23. Circulars from a Government That Is Nowhere to Be Found

       24. Disastrous Illusions

       What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, or Political Economy in One Lesson

       [The Author’s Introduction]

       1. The Broken Window

       2. Dismissing Members of the Armed Forces

       3. Taxes

       4. Theaters and the Fine Arts

       5. Public Works

       6. The Middlemen

       7. Trade Restrictions

       8. Machines

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       9. Credit

       10. Algeria

       11. Thrift and Luxury

       12. The Right to Work and the Right to Profit

      Appendixes

      Appendix 1. Further Aspects of Bastiat’s Life and Thought

       Appendix 2. The French State and Politics

       Appendix 3. Economic Policy and Taxation

       Appendix 4. French Government’s Budgets for Fiscal Years 1848 and 1849

       Appendix 5. Mark Twain and the Australian Negative Railroad

      Appendix 6. Bastiat’s Revolutionary Magazines

      Addendum: Additional Material by Bastiat

       “A Few Words about the Title of Our Journal The French Republic” (La République Française, 26 February 1848)

       “The Subprefectures,” 29 February 1848, La République Française

       Bastiat’s Speech on “Disarmament and Taxes” (August 1849)

       Glossaries

      Glossary of Persons

      Glossary of Places

       Glossary of Newspapers and Journals

       Glossary of Subjects and Terms

       Bibliographical Note on the Works Cited in This Volume

       Bibliography

       Index

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       Foreword

      “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”

      —FROM “THE STATE” (1848), BY FRÉDÉRIC BASTIAT

      Claude Frédéric Bastiat was born in France in 1801. Two hundred years later, in 2001, I was invited to speak at his birthday celebration.1 I titled my remarks “Why Bastiat Is My Hero.” That was over ten years ago, but I do not have to look back into my notes to remember the reasons why Bastiat was and still is my hero.

      During his brief life of forty-nine years, Bastiat fought for individual liberty in general and free trade in particular. He fought against protectionism, mercantilism, and socialism. He wrote with a combination of clarity, wit, and wisdom unmatched to this day. He not only made his arguments easy to understand; he made them impossible to misunderstand and to forget. He used humor and satire to expose his opponents’ arguments as not just wrong, but absurd, by taking them to their logical extreme. He noted that his adversaries often had to stop short in their arguments to avoid that trap.

      My introduction to Bastiat as a student was snippets from his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles” in economics textbooks. The brilliance of this text still thrills and inspires me.2 In the petition, the candle makers call on the Chamber of Deputies to pass a law requiring the closing of all blinds and shutters to prevent sunlight from coming inside. The sun was unfair

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      competition to the candle makers and they needed protection. Protection from the sunlight would not only benefit the candle makers and related industries competing with the sun; it would also benefit unrelated industries as spending and prosperity spread. Bastiat anticipated Keynesian multiplier analysis, although for Bastiat it was satire with a very serious intent.

      Bastiat wanted Economic Sophisms to serve as a handbook for free traders, and, indeed, when I was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, we used his writings in our economic education efforts. Throughout the book, Bastiat attacks protectionist sophisms, or fallacies, methodically and exhaustively; however, he identifies a major problem of persuasion, namely, that most sophisms contain some truth, usually a half-truth, but it is the half that is visible. As he writes in his introduction: “Protection brings