What is Free Trade?: An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "sophismes Éconimiques" Designed for the American Reader
1867
What is Free Trade?: An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "sophismes Éconimiques" Designed for the American Reader
1867
Translated by Alexander Del Mar
'What is Free Trade?' is an economic treatise by Frédéric Bastiat, first published in 1867, that critiques protectionist policies in favor of free trade. Bastiat argues that tariffs create artificial scarcity and harm consumers while benefiting select industries. He employs wit and irony to dismantle economic fallacies, making complex ideas accessible to the American reader. This adaptation of his earlier work 'Sophismes Économiques' remains significant for its logical rigor and satirical approach to economic discourse.
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“Suppose two countries, A and B. A possesses over B all kinds of advantages. You infer from this, that every sort of industry will concentrate itself in A, and that B is powerless. A, you say, sells much more than it buys; B buys much more than it sells. I might dispute this, but I respect your hypothesis. On this hypothesis, labour is much in demand in A, and will soon rise in price there. Iron, coal, land, food, capital, are much in demand in A, and they will soon rise in price there. Contemporaneously with this, labour, iron, coal, land, food, capital, are in little request in B, and will soon fall in price there. Nor is this all. While A is always selling, and B is always buying, money passes from B to A. It becomes abundant in A, and scarce in B. But abundance of money means that we must have plenty of it to buy everything else. Then in A, to the real dearness which arises from a very active demand, there is added a nominal dearness, which is due to a redundancy of the precious metals. Scarcity””
— Frédéric Bastiat
“But if men are, on the one hand, irresistibly impelled towards what is for their profit, and if, on the other, they resist instinctively what is hurtful, we are forced to conclude that each nation carries in its bosom a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of resistance, which forces are equally injurious to all other nations; or, in other words, that antagonism and war are the natural state of human society.””
— Frédéric Bastiat
“man becomes rich in proportion to the remunerative nature of his labor;””
— Frédéric Bastiat
