Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French economist and philosopher, is best known for his defense of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, and his ideas, especially at the time he conceived them were as profound as they were simple and elegant.

Bastiat recognized the absolute need to protect the smallest minority in the world, the individual, and he clearly saw the numerous dangers of state overreach, of aggressive interventionism and of the slippery slope to authoritarianism. Arguably he would have been very disturbed to see the state of the world today and he would have deeply lamented that his teachings were not only forgotten by most, but openly contradicted, as modern governments chose to follow the extreme opposite path from the one Bastiat recommended.

In his work “The Law”, he warns against “legal plunder,” where the state uses its authority to take from some to benefit others, distorting justice and corrupting economic incentives. This has become so commonplace today, so ubiquitous that nobody even questions it anymore, which only emboldens the State to aggress and to trespass even more heavily and blatantly into private affairs and in the lives of the governed. 

In his essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”, Bastiat also brings up one of my favorite concepts: the broken window fallacy. He illustrated the idea through........

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