VIDEO Clip: Pamela Geller on Blaze TV’s Andrew Wilcow show discussing Frédéric Bastiat

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Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. Frédéric Bastiat

As most Atlas readers know, the wellspring of all of my ideas and activism is individual rights. That is my battle, and I fight the enemies of individualism. So it was particularly enjoyable to do a whole show discussing this very thing. Andrew Wilcow did a whole show on
"Bastiat's Warning Against Big Government." Joining me on the panel were
Leo Rota from The Bastiat Society, Harry Binswanger from the Ayn Rand Institute, and Katherine Mangu-Ward from Reason Magazine.

Everyone should be made to read Bastiat. But generally it is the self-taught who have come to know and admire him. Universities embrace the haters of logic and reason (i.e. Kant), and Bastiat is hardly taught in a public school system that champions statism and collectivism. Bastiat asserted that the sole purpose of government is to protect
the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property. And this it is
dangerous and morally wrong for government to interfere with an
individual's other personal matters (clearly NYC Mayor Bloomberg isn't reading him). 

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He concluded that
the law cannot defend life, liberty, and property if it promotes "legal [or legalized] plunder,"
which he defined as using government force and laws to take something
from one individual and give it to others. And like Ayn Rand, Bastiat states that "We cannot doubt that self-interest is the
mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word
is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting
from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the
word selfishness." 


One of Bastiat's most important contributions to the field of
economics was his admonition to the effect that good economic decisions
can be made only by taking into account the "full picture." That is,
economic truths should be arrived at by observing not only the immediate
consequences – that is, benefits or liabilities – of an economic
decision, but also by examining the long-term second and third
consequences.

It was a marvelous hour — yes, an hour on philosophy, reason and
morality. Utterly fantastic. If I can find the whole hour, I will post.

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RCCA
RCCA
11 years ago

An excellent point about what would have been the benefit to the economy if all the taxes paid had been invested back into the economy versus failed government programs with no accountability.

David Howard
David Howard
11 years ago

Read the works of Bastiat in high school as self-assigned reading. He was a great wit, eloquent, and made economics easy, the Shakespeare of economics.

Richard Weinfeld
Richard Weinfeld
11 years ago

When a society tries to repeal the laws of economics and the laws of human nature, that society will be ruled by the law of unintended consequences.

TheDrinkingGourd
TheDrinkingGourd
11 years ago

Wow. That sounds great–if you can post the whole thing!
Thanks for all your work Pam. We’d be in so much trouble without you and your unwaning clarion call.

The Obama Timeline Author
The Obama Timeline Author
11 years ago

Bastiat was a genius and all high school and college students should be assigned his books. It was Bastiat’s work that inspired me to write my book, “What You Don’t Know About Economics Can Hurt You.”

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Thanks for sharing!