Frédéric Bastiat wrote these pamphlets and speeches between the 1840s and 1850. Selected Essays on Political Economy gathers thirteen of them in Seymour Cain's translation. George B. de Huszar arranged them and wrote the preface; F. A. Hayek wrote the introduction. Van Nostrand published this first English collection in 1964. This review follows the 1995 Foundation for Economic Education edition, reproduced by the Online Library of Liberty in 2011. Bastiat's recurring test: before crediting a law with a benefit, ask who supplied it and what they gave up.
The opening essay starts with a broken window, which gives the glazier work, while the six francs spent on glass would otherwise have bought something else. The owner gives up that other purchase, and its seller loses a sale onlookers overlook. A tax-paid salary likewise transfers a sum away from some taxpayer's spending. When an office or a bridge gives taxpayers a service worth its price, Bastiat calls the payment a fair exchange. He allows that public works in a harsh winter could act as insurance, moving labor and wages into hard times at some cost. His target is the jobs argument used as a substitute for proof of usefulness. On machines, he concedes that displaced workers suffer for a time before competition passes the savings to buyers.
Credit gets the same test: a farmer who borrows money for a plow is borrowing the plow. Peter owns the only one available and would lend it to John, whose honesty and property make him likely to repay, ahead of James. A state guarantee sends it to James instead. The stock of plows stays at one: James receives the plow John would otherwise have borrowed, and John goes back to the spade. Taxpayers become involuntary guarantors. Bastiat admits his example is stripped bare, holding the stock of capital and the lender's ranking of borrowers fixed so the reallocation stands out. He supports lending itself: where law obstructs borrowing, he wants the obstacle removed.
In Property and Law, Bastiat applies the word property to whatever a person's faculties produce through work or exchange, a claim he places before legislation, whose job is protecting it. If law created property, ownership would sit at a legislator's discretion, and investors would plan on shifting ground. He presents his natural-rights and providential premises openly, and his sketch of Rousseau and Roman law serves the argument more than legal history. Landowners and capitalists who sought tariffs to lift profits at workers' expense, he argues, set the precedent for the redistribution that later alarmed them, since workers would claim the same favor in the name of equality. His Free Trade Association accepted fiscal duties: its 1846 program allowed customs revenue sized to the treasury's needs and spent on common expenses. It objected to duties designed to exclude foreign goods so one class could charge more at home.
Bastiat's essay The State offers more than its famous one-line definition. He describes a public expecting generous benefits and light taxes at once, and governments promising both while their officials live on that same revenue. Borrowing can hide the contradiction for a while, at the price of looming bankruptcy and wrecked credit. He grants good arguments to two coherent models: a state that does much and takes much, and one whose action is barely felt. The incoherent choice is to demand everything from the state and refuse it the means. He prefers a state limited to the policing that secures justice and protects what belongs to each person.
His November 1849 speech on industrial combinations applies one rule to employers and workers alike. Any worker may refuse a wage he finds too low, and an act innocent for one stays innocent for thousands, since combining is a form of association. He keeps peaceful strikes and persuasion lawful and reserves punishment for violence and intimidation by threat. He notes that employers could combine quietly over dinner while workers combined in public, so the bill would in practice fall on one side. Its wording was uneven too: the employer article required an attempt to force wages down, the worker article only an effort to influence them. Bastiat expects many strikes to hurt the strikers, yet losses and mistakes, he holds, fall short of justifying a criminal ban on association. Freedom may bring nations hardship, he argues, and it is also their teacher.
The last essay, a March 1850 newspaper letter, answers Mauguin, a fellow representative who had counted France's import surplus as a national loss. Wine worth 50 francs at Bordeaux sells for 70 at Liverpool, and the proceeds buy coal worth 90 back home. Customs records 40 francs of excess imports, and the merchant books the same 40 francs as profit. A cargo of truffles lost at sea gives France a favorable balance built on sunken wealth. An editor's note says Bastiat pared down hypothetical figures he had used in 1845, so the sums illustrate accounting. Its lesson is an accounting distinction: a recorded import surplus and a merchant's gain can be the same 40 francs seen from two ledgers.
Readers who want practice tracing a cost from where it shows to where it falls will find the volume useful across taxes, credit, labor law and trade. Many examples are hypotheticals built to train reasoning and read best as such. Hayek's introduction offers his own assessment, best weighed separately from the essays. The Foundation for Economic Education reserves rights in this edition, and the Online Library of Liberty hosts it for reading: Online Library of Liberty PDF