U Not Gonna Like This

First from the Mises Institute (link)

CLAUDE FREDERIC BASTIAT was a French economist, legislator, and writer who championed private property, free markets, and limited government. Perhaps the main underlying theme of Bastiat's writings was that the free market was inherently a source of "economic harmony" among individuals, as long as government was restricted to the function of protecting the lives, liberties, and property of citizens from theft or aggression. To Bastiat, governmental coercion was only legitimate if it served "to guarantee security of person, liberty, and property rights, to cause justice to reign over all."




Bastiat emphasized the plan-coordination function of the free market, a major theme of the Austrian School, because his thinking was influenced by some of Adam Smith's writings and by the great French free-market economists Jean-Baptiste Say, Francois Quesnay, Destutt de Tracy, Charles Comte, Richard Cantillon (who was born in Ireland and emigrated to France), and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. These French economists were among the precursors to the modern Austrian School, having first developed such concepts as the market as a dynamic, rivalrous process, the free-market evolution of money, subjective value theory, the laws of diminishing marginal utility and marginal returns, the marginal productivity theory of resource pricing, and the futility of price controls in particular and of the government's economic interventionism in general.

you should aslo know (link)

"To be free or not to be free"



Those words were written 148 years ago by a French legislator who, in the final year of his life tried to warn France against the evils of socialism into which his nation had drifted and which he insisted was nothing less than a system of legalized plunder.

As Hall of Fame Catcher Yogi Berra might say "This is like deja vu all over again."

also (link)

In the revolutionary year of 1848, the French people, disgusted with monarchical corruption on behalf of special-interests, forced their king from power. In the turmoil that followed, socialist and other utopian schemes gained adherents. To combat these ideas, Bastiat, sick from tuberculosis, won a seat in the National Assembly from Landes. His earlier amicable contact with the poet Lamartine had made the future leader of the Second Republic something of a free trader. But when Lamartine endorsed interventionist programs Bastiat publicly opposed him. In the assembly Bastiat fought the socialists and communists, on the one hand, and the monarchists, protectionists, and militarists, on the other. His health failing, he valiantly tried to stave off the barrage of assaults on economic and civil liberties. As France veered toward another revolution in the summer of 1848 (this one aborted), Bastiat, in speech and essay, continued his battle for freedom and against statism.

Links

The Law - Frederic Bastiat (PDF Spanish)
http://www.hacer.org/pdf/LaLey.pdf

The Law - Audio book
http://www.freeaudio.org/fbastiat/thelaw.html

The Law
http://www.mises.org/books/thelaw.pdf

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7006/thelaw.html

http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Bastiat

http://www.mises.org/content/bastiat200.asp

http://www.mises.org/about/3227

http://bastiat.org/en/

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/BastiatBib.html

http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basSoph.html

http://cepa.newschool.edu/~het/profiles/bastiat.htm

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02345b.htm

http://www.lexrex.com/informed/otherdocuments/thelaw/main.htm

http://unix.dfn.org/af_FrederickBastiat_theLaw.shtml