Frédéric Bastiat's Legacy
In 2010 the worldwide teams of the Atlas Global Initiative are taking the clear and easily understood message of Frederic Bastiat - that of property, freedom, prosperity, and peace - to the people of the world, in dozens of languages. The project includes: essay contests, translation and publication of Bastiat’s works (in print and online), Freedom schools, videos, new media, such as blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Orkut, Vimeo, and more.
Evidence for the Relationship Between Free Trade and Peace
Evidence for the Relationship Between Free Trade and Peace
He used logic and humor to explode the fallacies on which interventionism and statism rest. He showed that destruction – through war or natural disasters – cannot create wealth, that restricting trade cannot expand prosperity, and that using force to benefit some at the expense of others erases from everyone’s conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
Bastiat showed that respect for property and free exchange is the foundation of freedom, prosperity, social progress, and peace – at home and abroad. Our property is always at risk from thieves. We lock our doors and employ police to protect us from common thieves, but protection from the biggest thieves - those who use the law to plunder - is much more difficult.
For that we need public education and moral awakening: stealing by the ballot box is no better than stealing by picking pockets.Bastiat devoted his life to promoting liberty by exposing the fallacious reasoning behind interventionist policies. His message remains as important today as ever, for we continue to hear the same errors that Bastiat refuted. They must be refuted again and again.
The issues Bastiat addressed are not of mere historical interest. Many people still espouse the doctrines of destructionism that Bastiat refuted. A summary of Bastiat’s written work can be found in Liberty Fund’s OnLine Library of Liberty. To access individual works, just click on the titles below:
Atlas’ Bastiat Project in Other Languages
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| in French | in Hindi | in Russian |
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| in Kurdish | in Swahili | in Portuguese |
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| in Arabic | in Vietnamese | in Chinese |
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| in Azeri | in Bahasa | |
The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won't Tell You.
Modern Day Examples of the Broken Window Fallacy
Economic historian Robert Higgs subjects to critical scrutiny the common claim that “World War II ended the Great Depression” and finds that Bastiat was right: destructionism does not promote economic prosperity:
