Frederic Bastiat on the Democrats (Illustrated)

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Frederic Bastiat was a French political economist, statesman, classical liberal theorist, and the French Assembly. He coined the important economic concept of opportunity cost. His ideas have become the foundation for libertarian and the Austrian schools of thought.

Most of Bastiat’s political writings were done during the years just before and immediately after the Revolution of February 1848 when France was rapidly turning to complete socialism. As a Deputy to the Legislative Assembly, Bastiat explained each socialist fallacy as it appeared and how socialism must inevitably degenerate into communism that it must fail.

Bastiat was not only firm support of free trade but also a deep thinker of democratic system from the perspectives of economics, politics, law, communism, mergers and acquisitions, and education. American political system is strongly influenced by his ideology. His concepts of free trade and self-responsibility of individual influenced Rousseau and Voltaire along with many other Enlightenment scholars and American Revolutionaries.

 In this essay, To the Democrats, Mr. Bastiat shared his thoughts about American democrats and Franc democrats. He praised American democrats in the essay as “Thus, while the American democrats, having empowered the public police force to punish individual plunder, are very much concerned that this force should not itself become spoliative; the French democrats, on the contrary, make of this force an instrument of plunder, and this seems to be the very foundation and essence of their system.”

Bastiat’s reasoning still remains as relevant today as it was then.   This essay is one of the most important essays about the deepest thoughts of American democrats and French democrats by Frederic Bastiat, one of the greatest thinkers of political economics on the planet. The Essay is already read more than a hundred years and it will still be read for another century due to its truths.