Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) enters this wiki as the great popularizer of the free-market case: the originator of the seen-and-the-unseen and the broken-window fallacy, and the author of The Law’s account of legal plunder.

Place in This Wiki

Bastiat was a French economist and essayist of the mid-nineteenth-century classical-liberal school, whose gift was less for system-building than for exposing economic fallacy with clarity and satirical wit. He argued for free trade against the protectionists of his day with a talent for turning their own logic against them, showing essay by essay the hidden costs their visible favors concealed.

The wiki draws on two strands of his work. From “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” comes the principle that sound economics reckons with unseen, foregone alternatives and not merely visible effects — the analytic core of the case against make-work, protectionism, and arguments that destruction creates jobs. From The Law comes his theory of legal plunder: the perversion of law from the protection of person and property into an instrument of organized taking. The wiki reads him alongside its later Austrian material and the public-choice analysis of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, to which his exposure of hidden costs runs parallel.

See Also

• The Seen and the Unseen - his seen/unseen principle and the broken-window fallacy
• The Law - his essay on law and legal plunder, present in the wiki
• Free Trade and Comparative Advantage - the free-trade cause his satires defended
• Political Means and Economic Means - the plunder-versus-production distinction his work anticipates
• Crony Capitalism - The sale of political privilege to favored firms — subsidies, bailouts, protective tariffs, licensing barriers, regulatory advantage — dressed as free enterprise
• Economics in One Lesson
• Henry Hazlitt

Sources

• [Essays on Political Economy (Full Text Aggregate)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15962 (Project Gutenberg); public-domain 19th-century English translation; SHA-256 1b4ca6a2ae3370f35f4e76b87721342ca79214e4d090becfaf6cbb7b2aed0e12) - Bastiat’s essays, including “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” and “The Law,” the basis for this profile