Maggie's Farm

A new Bastiat book: Man and the Statesman, The: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics (The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat).

Much of it has only been available in French. Review here. A quote from the review:

Peace and freedom were at the top of Bastiat's agenda, each cause being indispensable to the other, he believed. Statism was his bane. "The dominant notion, the one that has permeated every class of society," he wrote in the wake of the Revolution of 1848, "is that the state is responsible for providing a living for everyone."

"Poor people!" he lamented of the duped French populace in the same tumultuous year. "How much disillusionment is in store for them! It would have been so simple and so just to ease their burden by decreasing their taxes; they want to achieve this through the plentiful bounty of the state and they cannot see that the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!"