This free sunlight is hurting
And natural resources; the end of the “class struggle” that… was based primarily on such economic injustices as tariffs, monopolies, and other legal distortions of the market; the end of the “suicidal policy” of colonialism; the abolition of war as a national policy; and the best possible education, housing, and medical care for all the people.21 Bastiat was a genius at explaining all these economic principles and outcomes by the use of satire and parables, the most famous of which is “TheCandlemaker’s Petition,” which “requested” a law to mandate the covering of all windows and skylights and other openings, holes, and cracks through which the light of the sun is able to enter houses. This free sunlight is hurting the business of us deserving manufacturers of candles. Another of Bastiat’s most memorable satires is his destruction of the protectionist argument that a “balance of trade” is necessarily desirable. A French merchant is said to have shipped 50,000 worth of goods to the VS., sold them for a 517,000 profit, and purchased 67,000 worth of US. cotton, which he then imported into France. Since France had therefore imported more than it exported, it “suffered” an “unfavorable” balance of trade. A more “favorable” situation, Bastiat sarcastically wrote, would have been one where the merchant attempted a second transaction in the U.S., but had his ship sunk by a storm as it left the harbor. The customs house at the harbor would therefore have recorded more exports than imports, creating a very “favorable” balance of trade. But since storms are undependable, Bastiat reasoned, the “best” policy would be to have the government throw all the merchants’ goods into the sea as they left French harbors, thereby guaranteeing a “favorable balance of trade”! It is this kind of display of literary genius that must have motivated Henry Hazlitt to take up Bastiaf s fallen mantle a century after his death. Bastiat’s writing constitutes an intellectual bridge between the ideas of the pre-Austrian economists, such as Say, Cantillon, de Tracy, Comte, Turgot, and Quesnay, and the Austrian tradition of Carl Menger and his students. He was also a model of scholarship for those Austrians.