breeds a war of all against all. But law, properly conceived, is, as Bastiat states, “the common power organized to obstruct injustice and, in short, the law is justice”11—a straightforward but striking formula that encapsulates a whole body of theory.
IN witnessing these processes at work in the French assemblies of 1848 and 1849, Bastiat was led to some important theoretical insights into the nature of the state itself. He most clearly expressed these views in another pamphlet,
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“The State,” which he wrote in that most revolutionary year of 1848 and from which comes perhaps his best-remembered quotation: “The state is the great fiction by which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”12
STATE EDUCATION
In his writings Bastiat gives a lot of attention to the problem of education. A good example is his opposition to the importance placed upon the teaching of Latin in the school curriculum. In his own education Bastiat had attended a progressive school that emphasized modern languages and practical subjects. He was opposed to learning Latin and reading the works of the famous Latin authors because, in his view, Roman civilization was based on slavery and the glorification of war and the state; commerce, individual rights, and natural law were ignored or downplayed.
In a submission to the Mimerel Commission in 1847,13 Bastiat opposed the politicalization of the teaching of economics in higher education. Apart from the fact that political economists were not granted their own faculty but had to teach within the schools of law, the commission at first wanted to abolish the teaching of political economy altogether. Eventually it relented and recommended that if the political economists must teach, they should be required by the state to soften their relentless criticism of protection by giving “equal time” to protectionist ideas—an early version of “teaching the debate,” if you will. Bastiat naturally opposed this measure. His view of state education became so severe that he saw no other option than its complete abolition. His pamphlet “Baccalaureate and Socialism” (1850) was written expressly in order to explain an amendment he had proposed to the National Assembly: he dared to ask that the state-run universities no longer be the sole grantors of degrees, thereby ending the state’s monopoly over the awarding of such degrees.14
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HAYEK AND SPONTANEOUS ORDER
Two of the themes Bastiat pursues in the pamphlets are his advocacy of the “harmony” and justice of freely acting individuals in the marketplace and his criticism of state intervention and “plunder” to create authoritarianism or socialism. Friedrich Hayek called these opposing worldviews “spontaneous order” and “constructivism,” respectively.
During the 1840s a new socialist movement sprang up in France, and it would play a significant role during the upheavals of the 1848 revolution.15 Bastiat’s writing on this topic16 places the reader at the very center of the debates that explain the historical evolution of France and of a great part of the world. Similarly, as Hayek has persuasively argued, Bastiat is at the very center of the fundamental debates of political philosophy.17
The coexistence since the eighteenth century of both these streams of thought (the classical liberal and the socialist) has arguably been the source of the ambiguity in the meaning of the words liberty and property during the French Revolution and its aftermath. One can see this conflict played out in the various versions of declarations of rights that emerged periodically during the Revolution, beginning with the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
Bastiat criticized such thinkers as Fénelon, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
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Mably, and Robespierre, who had done much to inspire modern enlightened public opinion. Bastiat objected to their claims that property rights are created by the state and are thus “conventional” and not “natural,” that is, existing prior to any man-made law. Rousseau comes in for particularly harsh criticism by Bastiat for the distinction he makes between “individual liberty” (which Rousseau regards as “natural”) and “property” (which Rousseau considers purely conventional).
According to Bastiat, this false distinction led Rousseau to conclude that the state had the right to enact legislation establishing the right to work, the right to get relief (welfare), and the right to impose progressive taxation. Robespierre, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, especially during the 1793–94 Reign of Terror, had been directly influenced by Rousseau, whom Bastiat quotes in “Baccalaureate and Socialism”: “Property is the right held by each citizen to enjoy and dispose of possessions that are guaranteed to him by the law.”18 In Bastiat’s view, if property were not a natural right that existed prior to the state, then the state (or whoever temporarily controlled the organs of the state) could define what “property” was and legislate to create any kind of society it desired.
THE French revolutionaries of the 1790s and the 1840s had tried to apply what Bastiat called the “communist principle” to the formation of declarations of rights and constitutions and to the development of government policies regarding price controls, make-work schemes, and other economic interventions by the state. Such an extreme form of despotism frightened many French citizens in the 1790s. These citizens, seeking security and stability, turned toward a Roman-inspired form of despotism,19 such as that offered by Napoléon Bonaparte.
After lurching from the radicalism of the Jacobins to the militaristic dictatorship of Napoléon and to the conservatism of the restored Bourbon monarchy, the French people seemed to have settled upon a form of political
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armistice after the July revolution, with the forces of revolution and counterrevolution achieving a kind of temporary balance. Bastiat, however, unhappily believed that the French continued to educate their youth with the ideas of Rousseau and Caesar, thus trapping them in a maze that began with dreams of utopia, followed by experimentation in an attempt to create this utopia on earth, and then finally political reaction after these dreams inevitably fell apart. In its incarnation in the revolutionary period this maze began with the ideas of Rousseau, was followed by the revolutionary communism of Robespierre and his followers, and ended in the military despotism of Napoléon. In 1848 it looked to Bastiat as if France were going to repeat this pattern all over again, this time under the influence of the new socialist movement that had sprung up in the 1840s.
PEACE, LIBERTY, AND TAXES
In the pamphlet “Peace and Freedom or the Republican Budget” (1849), Bastiat’s skill as a writer and thinker enables him to rapidly turn the mundane topic of the national budget into one of principle and high theory. He quickly goes beyond strict budgetary considerations to reach a high level of theoretical analysis and, in so doing, provides an original and audacious contribution to the field of tax theory. In fact, he may be the first author to support the idea that “taxes kill taxes”—in other words, the concept known in our own time as the Laffer Curve.
In this text Bastiat blames both the “financiers,” who try to obtain fiscal equilibrium by taxing people, and the so-called advanced republicans, who make so many promises to their constituents that an increase in taxes is unavoidable. Bastiat believed that it was important to secure the stability of the young republic by alleviating the tax burden on the people, thus inducing them to “love the republic.” For Bastiat, in order for public finance to blossom, the rational thing to do would be to decrease tax rates, not increase them, because, for the state, “taxing more is to receive less.”20 Bastiat does not hesitate to write that even if there is a budget deficit, taxes must be reduced, as much out of principle as out of the recognition that economic hardship has been so severe that the people have to receive some relief. As he put it, such a solution “is not boldness, it is prudence”!21