Economic Sophisms

By Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He was the leader of the free-trade movement in France from its inception in 1840 until his untimely death in 1850. The first 45 years of his life were spent in preparation for five tremendously productive years writing in favor of freedom. Bastiat was the founder of the weekly newspaper
Le Libre Échange, a contributor to numerous periodicals, and the author of sundry pamphlets and speeches dealing with the pressing issues of his day. Most of his writing was done in the years directly before and after the Revolution of 1848—a time when France was rapidly embracing socialism. As a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, Bastiat fought valiantly for the private property order, but unfortunately the majority of his colleagues chose to ignore him. Frédéric Bastiat remains one of the great champions of freedom whose writings retain their relevance as we continue to confront the old adversary.

Book Cover

Translator/Editor

Arthur Goddard, trans., trans.

First Pub. Date

1845

Publisher

Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

Pub. Date

1996

Comments

Introduction by Henry Hazlitt

Copyright

The text of this edition is under copyright

A Petition

First Series, Chapter 7

From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Candlesticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from the Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

To the Honorable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the
domestic market for
domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for applying your—what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, and, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice—your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is
flooding the
domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly that we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.
47*

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds—in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honorable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate. Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honor of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the
specialties of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity.

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle that guides your entire policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order
to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well! Surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well! If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods
because and
in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only
half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in
complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are
better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: +�=+–; in other words, it would be to heap
absurdity upon
absurdity.

Labor and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labor that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at
half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being
semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labor withstand the competition of foreign labor when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is
half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being
totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product—coal, iron, wheat, or textiles—comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labor than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is a
gratuitous gift that is conferred upon us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles,
in proportion as their price approaches
zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

47.

[“Perfidious Albion” is England, along with a typically French jibe at the English fog, which keeps the sun from interfering with artificial light in England as much as it does in France. During the 1840’s, Franco-English relations were occasionally very tense.—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 8

48.

[A department of southwestern France along the estuary of the Gironde River, famed for such wines as Médoc, Sauternes, and Graves.—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 10

49.

[This is a partial quotation from La Fontaine’s fable,
The Coach and the Fly (Le Coche et la mouche): “Over a sandy, hilly, and difficult road, / Exposed to the sun on all sides / Six strong horses were drawing a coach.”—TRANSLATOR.]

50.

[These names contain the roots of the Latin words meaning “foolish” and “childish.”—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 11

51.

[Christophe Joseph Alexandre Mathieu de Dombasle (1777-1843), a farmer and agronomist noted for his developments of farm machinery, and the author of various works on taxation setting forth his protectionist ideas.—TRANSLATOR.]

52.

[Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès (1778-1870), a French economist, statistician, and author, Director of the Statistical Bureau in the Ministry of Trade, 1834-1852.—TRANSLATOR.]

53.

[This thought often recurs in the author’s writings. In his eyes it was of capital importance, and it led him, four days before his death, to make this recommendation: “Tell M. de F.* to treat economic questions always from the consumer’s point of view, for the interest of the consumer is identical with that of mankind.”—EDITOR.]

* [Fontenay, the French editor.—TRANSLATOR.]

54.

[Auguste, Vicomte de Saint-Chamans (1777-1861), a Deputy and Councillor of State, a protectionist, and a proponent of the balance of trade. The quotation is from his
Du Système impôt fondé sur les principes d’économie politique.—TRANSLATOR.]

55.

[Cf.
infra, Second Series, chap. 5, and
Economic Harmonies, chap. 4.—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 12

56.

[Bastiat here refers by name to certain securities that enjoyed wide public confidence at the time: those of the Comptoir Ganneron, a bank in which, at the height of the speculation, almost four hundred million francs were invested; those of the fur-trading company founded by Sir Alexander MacKenzie and later amalgamated with the original Hudson’s Bay Company; and those of the Northern Railway of France.—TRANSLATOR.]

57.

[An old French measure of area differing in value according to locality but being about an acre.—TRANSLATOR.]

58.

[Provence is an old province of southeastern France along the Mediterranean. Médoc is a farming district southwest of the Gironde River. The Hyères Islands are in the Mediterranean off Provence.—TRANSLATOR.]

59.

[Cf.
Economic Harmonies, chap. 14.—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 13

Categories: Frederic Bastiat