Date: 12 May, 2015
“Who put the ‘Bastiat’ in the Bastiat Society?”.
A talk given to the Bastiat Society of Nashville, TN. Text of Lecture HTML – Overhead Images PDF
Bastiat’s use of Literature in Defense of Free Markets
Date: 14 April, 2015
“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature I: Bastiat’s use of Literature in Defense of Free Markets and his Rhetoric of Economic Liberty.”
A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF.
The fountain dedicated to Molière on the rue de Richelieu, Paris where the publishing firm Guillaumin was located. They published all of Bastiat’s books.
Abstract: In this paper I will show how one economist used literature in creative and amusing ways to assist him in defending free trade and free markets from their intellectual and political opponents in France during the 1840s. The economic journalism which Frédéric Bastiat produced at this time is some of the best ever written and is still a model for economists today. His knowledge of both high and low French culture and literature was extensive, drawing upon the plays of Molière and the fables of La Fontaine at one end of the spectrum, as well as the political drinking songs and poems of Béranger at the other. These are all examples of Bastiat’s use of “literature in economics”.
The Economics of Robinson Crusoe from Defoe to Rothbard
Date: 14 April, 2015
“Literature IN Economics, and Economics AS Literature II: The Economics of Robinson Crusoe from Defoe to Rothbard by way of Bastiat.”
A paper given at the Association of Private Enterprise Education International Conference (April 12-14, 2015), Cancún, Mexico. HTML and PDF. An earlier working title was “Robinson Crusoe and Praxeology: A History”.
Abstract: Daniel Dafoe’s novel The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Marriner (1719) has provided economists and social theorists with a rich and seemingly infinitely broad canvas on which they can paint whatever picture they like of the nature of economic activity. In addition to Dafoe’s own economically informed, English Protestant original story, there have been Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, neo-classical, as well as Austrian accounts of the activities of the man ship-wrecked on the Island of Despair. These have been termed “Robinsonades” or “Crusoe economics.”
Molinari’s “Eleventh Soirée” on the private provision of security
Date: 6 April, 2015
A revised translation of Molinari’s “Eleventh Soirée” on the private provision of police and defence will be published in an anthology on Panarchy: Political Theories of Non-Territorial States edited by Aviezer Tucker and Gian Piero de Bellis for Routledge (2016). I updated the translation and added many footnotes.
The Liberal Roots of American Conservatism
Date: 28 March, 2015
“The Liberal Roots of American Conservatism: Bastiat and the French Connection.” A paper given to the Philadelphia Society meeting March 27-29, 2015 on “The Roots of American Conservatism – and its Future”. HTML and PDF
Abstract: The paper discusses the contribution to American conservative thought of the economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) and a number of other French philosophes, classical liberals, and economists since the founding of the American Republic. In the first part of the paper I examine the influence the political theorist and economist Destutt de Tracy had on Thomas Jefferson, the impact the economist Jean-Baptiste Say had on the teaching of economics in America in the first half of the 19th century, and the influence of the free trade advocate and economic theorist Frédéric Bastiat had on the American free trade movement and the school of thought his ideas engendered in the second half of the century. The second part of the paper deals with the influence of Bastiat on the Conservative and Libertarian movements especially after the Second World War in Los Angeles and NYC, with the activities of R.C. Hoiles’ Freedom Newspapers, Leonard Read and the FEE, Ludwig von Mises and his graduate students at NYU, and Ronald Reagan for GE. The paper concludes with a discussion of the resurgence of interest in Bastiat’s idea in the first decade of the 21st century in both America and France.