​Critical Book Review of Economic Sophisms by Frederic Bastiat

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Claude Frederic Bastiat was a famous French political economist which was born in 1801 in the French harbor city, near Bayonne. He wrote a large quantity of pro free-market compositions opposing to differential tariffs, taxes on wine, land taxes and so on. Encouraged by the British Anti-Corn Law League in Great Britain, Bastiat arranged the French Free Trade Association to struggle trade barriers in France. Bastiat wrote many essays and articles on economics themes, including his significant and best-selling selection of essays – “Economic Sophisms” which was written in the 1840s. Bastiat got a chair in the French parliament. Bastiat died in Rome, 1850, on Christmas Eve.
Bastiat defended private possession, free markets, and limited government protectionism. Possibly the basic theme of Bastiat’s texts was that the free market was intrinsically an origin of “economic agreement” amid individuals, as long as government was limited to the role of protecting the lives, freedoms, and possession of individuals from theft or attack. Bastiat argues that all economic resolutions should be made with the consumer in mind. And government does not get its authority to use force.
According to his first thesis Bastiat alleges that protectionists look only at the concerns of the producers and break to see the unintended results of their actions on consumers and even on other producers. “The protectionist system and the colonial system are, then, simply two aspects of one and the same theory.” wrote Bastiat (Bastiat). Protectionism is the primary sin in the sense that protectionism in one area begets calls for protectionism in even another till we have a intricated, convoluted system of accumulated taxes, providing subsidies resulting in uniformly towering prices and scarcity instead of wealth which would have resulted if protectionism had permitted free trade in the first place.
Bastiat’s second thesis is that “Life is a present from God”, that life needs an individual to exercise his thoughts and body so as to remain alive (freedom). “Government officials entrust the executive authority itself with the power to fix the limits of its own activities and requirements. In the meanwhile, things go from bad to worse, and at last people open their eyes, not to the remedy, but to the evil.” (Bastiat). Bastiat notices that rights of life, freedom and possession justify the use of force when one is faced with force (or the threat of force) as opposed to his person or possession (self defense). Bastiat clarifies that a government’s authority to use force is entrusted to it by the people whose behavior it governs: appropriately, government is to use force only to defend the life, freedom and property of those it governs.
Frederic Bastiat was not a theoretic of economics; he did not do any distinctive contribution to economic theory. Bastiat’s win puts on the triumph he gained as an essayist, an observer of economic delusiveness and as one of the foremost upholders of free trade in the Europe. That in itself is an attainment that is worth the delight of anybody who is an adherent of free trade. And that is exactly what Bastiat has attempted to reveal in his book “Economic Sophisms”.
He was an ace of the fight of declarations and reasons when it came to the protection of free market and democracy. Even those critics who did disagree with his ideas never refused that he was among the economists of his age the wittiest, humorous and readable. Ludwig von Mises, the significant Austrian economist called Bastiat a “diamond stylist” and wrote about his text that it was a “quite authentic pleasure” (Mises). Another great economist – Josef Schumpeter, who in his famous history of economic ideas of 1954 rather raucously denied that Bastiat was an important economist at all, allowed that he was “the most magnificent economic journalist who ever lived” (Schumpeter). In the “New Palgrave”, the most esteemed economic dictionary in Great Britain, Schumpeter is mentioned as quite clearly a genius of sagacity and satire, frequently descripted as a fusion of Voltaire and Franklin. I totally agree with them, because many of the arguments made in the book became a part of popular wisdom nowadays and that is why might be seen very important. This book is good arsenal for the libertarian.

Works Cited
Bastiat, Frederic. “Economic Sophisms”. Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education. 1996
Mises, von Ludwig. “Liberalism”. The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington, NY. Online edition Copyright The Mises Institute, 2000.
Schumpeter, Joseph. “History of Economic Analysis”. New York: Oxford University Press. 1954.

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