I. General Neglect of Bastiat

French laissez faire liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801-December 24, 1850) has suffered over the years from a particularly bad press. Karl Marx called him “the shallowest and therefore the most successful representative of the apologists of vulgar economics.” This portrait may have stemmed from Marx’s resentment towards a political writer whose writing was clear and who gained a large audience in his lifetime. There is no body of literature asking What Bastiat Really Meant, whereas a cottage industry arose in the case of Marx. And of course Bastiat was a great enemy and trenchant critic of socialism.

Bastiat has been dismissed by those who might have been expected to be friendlier towards him. Thus Joseph Schumpeter wrote: “I do not hold that Bastiat was a bad theorist. I hold that he was no theorist.” English-speaking economists generally have regarded Bastiat as a “mere popularizer” of the ideas of the great Adam Smith.

One of the few writers who had any thing good to say of Bastiat was Franz Oppenheimer, the German sociologist and state theorist. He wrote that “Bastiat clearly distinguishes between ‘production’ and ‘spoliation’ (as John Rae [did] between production and acquisition) and names as the chief forms of spoliation: war, slavery, theocracy, and monopoly.” Further, Bastiat “even defines monopoly entirely correctly as my only predecessor known to me: it carries force into competition and thereby falsifies the correct relation between services received and services earned.” ...