 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Our guest this weekend is David Hart, editor of Liberty Fun Books and our guest lecturer today at our Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn. His topic is Friedrich Bosteat. He's the radical we think we know from the law and the broken window fallacy, but it turns out he's so much more than that. He's actually a very serious radical both in his personal and professional life and an underappreciated theorist. So here to explain what you don't know about Friedrich Bosteat is David Hart in an outstanding 45 minute lecture. It's well worth your time. Stay tuned and have a great weekend. Henry Hazlick and Bosteat both were very important in my own intellectual development. I was a high school student in Sydney, Australia when I discovered the works of Ayn Rand and Audie von Mises and I subscribed, sent away to the Foundation for Economic Education and to Laysay Fair Books, which was based in San Francisco. And I would order boxes of books, which the postman would laboriously walk up the driveway of my parents' home in Sydney, saying, why are you buying all these books from America? Don't we produce books in Australia? Some of those books that came from the Foundation for Economic Education included their editions of Bosteat that were done in the 1960s, as well as Henry Hazlick's economics in one lesson. And that was really my introduction to free market economics, which was then closely followed by reading of Rothbard and Mises and other people. So I have a profound intellectual debt to both Bosteat and Henry Hazlick. What I want to do today is to talk to you about some aspects of Bosteat's life and thought that may not be well known to you. And I've called it the unseen radical. And this is obviously a play on words on Bosteat's last and perhaps best known work, the seen and the unseen. If you remember, Bosteat defines a bad economist as someone who just looks for the immediately obvious effects of a government policy. The good economist, however, knows that there's something deeper going on that some of the consequences will be hidden or they will be delayed or they will be difficult to immediately identify. And so he described the things that were immediately seen as the obvious, the unseen as the more complicated. But I think that can also be applied to Bosteat. He went through several periods where he was virtually unseen for his contributions, both in his own day and in today. And I want to try and unpack some of those for you. The word radical by using a number of different ways. First of all there is the radicalism of his personal style and behavior. And this doesn't come out in the biographies that I've looked at him about him. But it did come out in the correspondence, which was in our volume one. He was a really radical, unique individual. And I want to give you a flavor of that, both in his dress, his language, and his attitudes to other people and society in general. Another usage of the word radical is his innovative ideas and his theories. And one of the things that made him unseen to his own colleagues, they did not appreciate the originality and the complexity and the great worth of his theoretical work. They dismissed him as many people have done since as just a good economic journalist. So frustratingly for him, he wasn't fully appreciated and seen in his own day. And then today we have people who do see different sides of it, of Bastia. We have in free market circles, he's widely regarded for his writings of the economic sophisms, which are some of the most brilliant economic journalism ever written. Conservatives today see him as the author of the state and the law to important essays about limited government and the nature and origin of law. And the Austrians also appreciate and see him because of his quite precocious insights into subjective value theory well ahead of his time. But my argument is that there is much, much more to Bastia. And what I've been uncovering in my editing of the collected works, this is volume three, about 700 pages has just come out. This is of a projected six volume series. So about 3000 words in total. One of the problems was with seeing the true Bastia is that when Fee did their translations in the mid 1960s, they translated less than half of his work. And so there's a lot, if that's all you know about us, Bastia, you're in for a surprise and a pleasant surprise because there is so much more to the man. Let me just give you a brief list of some of the things that I think make him a radical and very interesting libertarian theorist and activist and personality. One of the first things that happened that came to my attention was when I was reading through his letters was he had an initial radicalization as a young man at a private college which had a very innovative curriculum, which shows the importance of not having a state education if you want to think critically and as a real individual. He became in his 20s somewhat of a social radical and a non-conformist outsider and he took that with him from his provincial origins to Paris when he went there in the mid 1840s, much to the consternation of his more conservative, conservative, socially conservative colleagues amongst the economic circle in Paris. Then when he was an economic journalist writing some wonderful essays attacking subsidies and economic protection and tariffs, he developed a whole new rhetoric of liberty, it's my expression, to describe his style, his rhetoric of liberty and his willingness to use harsh language to describe the bad consequences of government actions. So he would call a spade a spade or as the French say, appallé un char char to call a cat a cat. And I think there's a considerable similarity between Bastille and Rothbard because Rothbard also used harsh language to talk about how the state plundered and murdered and so on. Another factor in his radicalism is it's not well appreciated how much he was opposed to things like military expenditure and war and colonialism. And conservatives who appreciate his writings on free trade often don't want to know that this was intimately connected to his opposition to war. Another factor that made him a radical is he had utopian dreams. I call him these utopian dreams utopian because he himself described in one of his great economic sophisms called the utopian. He had utopian dreams about what he would do if he were made dictator for a day, which was to drastically slash government, both expenditure and its size and scope. And that wasn't the only time he did this. There are other writings where he expresses his utopian dreams to dismantle the state. Another aspect of his radicalism is his active support for the revolution that broke out in February of 1848 and the inauguration of the Second Republic. And he was very active in the Second Republic as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, but he was also willing to go out onto the streets of Paris with a little magazine that he and friends like Gustave de Molinari produced and handed out on the streets to the workers, trying to persuade them not to take the socialist ideas seriously, to think more about free markets and about private property rights. And he was on the streets of Paris twice, once in February, March, and then again in June when the troops were called out to put down the rioters and hundreds, if not thousands of people were just were killed when the French military were firing artillery down the streets of Paris to destroy the barricades. And Bastillard and some of his correspondents talks about how he was caught on the streets while he was handing out these pamphlets and what he did to try and help some of the injured people. He's also played a very important role in the Chamber of Deputies as the Vice President of the Finance Committee. They recognized his, when he was elected to the chamber in April of 1848, he was immediately appointed to this important position in the Finance Committee and he would make regular reports to the chamber about the state of French finances and he was constantly telling them, we are in a crisis, we have to cut government expenditure, we have to balance the budget and in order to do this we have to slash military expenditure, because that was the single biggest item in the budget. On top of all this, while he's agitating for free trade, while he's in the Chamber of Deputies lobbying to balance the budget, he's also realized that he had some important and original economic ideas which he was trying to put together to write his important theoretical treatise economic harmonies and the tragedy of that of course is he kept getting distracted by the political events around him, I guess you'd call a revolution a kind of distraction and he never was able to finish writing this book, he knew that he was dying, I think he was dying of throat cancer which was extraordinarily painful and he was probably on Loudonham to try and keep the pain under control and to the very end he kept writing and working on his project but he only was able to finish the first volume which was published in January of 1850 and after his death on Christmas Eve in 1850 his friends and colleagues put together the remnants of his papers in an expanded volume which was about twice the size which came out in mid-1851 but when you read through not just the sketches and chapters of the economic harmonies scattered throughout his other writings, I've found about a dozen or so key innovative economic ideas, many of them Austrian, some of them public choice, others just good economic analysis and I thought well when did he get some of these ideas, when did he start thinking in this original way and my original hunch was that when he went to Paris it was to work as a journalist and a free trade activist and that he learned economics when he was in Paris mixing with these other economists but just in the last couple of weeks as I was working through volume four for our collective works, I was trying to track when he first used some of these key economic concepts and I kept coming back to one essay that he wrote to criticise La Martin, the famous French poet and in an article that he wrote in January 1845, so before he moved to Paris he already had in his mind eight or ten of these key economic ideas already in his head so he went to Paris I think with his mind full of innovative and original ideas and it wasn't the influence of the other Paris economists around him that led him to write economic harmonies but I'll say a little bit about that more in a moment so he's an innovative theoretical economist I think ahead of his time by many years if not decades and it took someone like Rothbard back in the 1950s and 60s to see and to recognise Bastiaz's originality and to actually use him as a stimulus to in the first three or four chapters of man economy and state if you read the footnotes carefully and I love footnotes because I write too many of them in the Bastiaz translation you'll see Rothbard's debt to Bastiaz methodologically individualism and I'll say a bit more about that if you want in addition to being a theoretical or budding theoretical economist who had his career cut short by his premature death he was a theorist of classical liberal class analysis and his theory of plunder is of course one of the key terms in that theory it was he was going to write a history of plunder after he'd finished he had a plan to write three volumes the first volume he planned to write a volume called social harmonies and this was to be about how voluntary action creates cooperation and harmony in the social realm which is family the church society at large and then he found out he was running out of time and he really had to concentrate on one particular type of harmony and he decided to focus on economic harmony so it was meant to be volume two and then the history of plunder was meant to be volume three which was not just a history of plunder but a history of disharmony the first two volumes to be about harmony and how harmonies played out when free people were left free to cooperate to cooperate amongst themselves and then of course he realized that history was full of disharmony full of statist activity which created disharmony and plunder and class rule and so on and that was to be the volume of the third volume in his series so this just to give you an overview of some of the radical aspects of Bastia's thinking and I want to I won't have time to talk about all of those unfortunately because there is a book here I think and the book is slowly emerging and I'll get around to finishing it one day the other the sad thing is that most of the people who have worked on this project have died and I think I'm the last surviving member of the original team so this is like the curse of Bastia on whoever works on this project we've lost two translators and the original general editor Jacques de Garnet so wish me luck you know so that's just the overview let me just show you some of the on seeing or not seeing Bastia depends on where you're standing and what I was standing in Sydney in Australia reading Henry Hazlott and Bastia for the first time my initial reaction to Bastia was he is a very clever and smart and witty journalist and left him at that and moved on to more serious economists serious economists like Mises and Rothbard it was only when I was asked by Liberty Fund to work on this project about 12 years ago that I went back and read for the first time in French everything that Bastia had had written and I was ashamed to say I had completely misunderstood underestimated misunderstood the significance of Bastia as a serious social thinker and I'm trying to make some atonement for those those that's original sin of not paying full attention to Bastia and part of the problem is that he's such a good writer that you just swept up by his writings and you don't look deeper it's only when you start looking at it more closely and you realize how is this constructed what are the underlying ideas who is he referring to he's constantly quoting French literature which showed a deep reading of Mollier and Lafontaine and some of the other French classics and so really the perspective understanding of who and what Bastia is depends on time and place and and he's had a terrible track record of first of all he's not understood by his colleagues he's forgotten in the late 19th century practically people like Schumpeter say that he's his famous quote you know what kind of a theorist was Bastia he says I don't think he was a theorist of any kind and then even Hayek grudgingly sort of condemns him with faint praise by saying yes he was a great economic journalist it's best not to ask too much about him as a theorist you know so this is Henry Haslett economics in one lesson and we can if you've read anything if you read the introduction to this book you'll know that Haslett was deeply indebted to Bastia and he plagiarized Bastia's subtitle in the title of his book this is the edition that Arcee Hoyles he Arcee Hoyles there was a publisher of newspapers in America he started the freedom newspapers chain and he moved to Santa Ana Southern California and came across and he met Leonard Reed who was then the head of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles and somehow they discovered the right the writings of Bastia in the some 19th century translations I think the the story I've read is that Leonard Reed was giving a talk for the Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles and someone came up to me and said you sound just like Frederick Bastia and he said who the hell's Frederick Bastia I never heard of him and so he went back and found these 19th century translations of of Bastia and talked to Hoyles and Hoyles was on this anti-New Deal anti-FDR campaign and saw immediately that Bastia's writings was perfectly relevant to 1940s America and so he used the printing presses of the Santa Ana Register to print these wonderful red covered editions of Bastia which I'm interested to to see Rothbard has these exact editions in the library outside as does the founder of Liberty Fund Pierre Goodrich he has copies of this and when I was here last year I took a photograph of Rothbard's copies and he he mutilated these books and here is a page from the economic sofisms where he's underlined so much stuff and then he has written magnificent at the bottom because of pure Rothbard so you know if you want to have a a charcoal go out and read some of Rothbard's comments on on Bastia but you know he so he was discovered by Hoyles and Leonard Reed in the 40s and then Rothbard through them I think discovered Bastia and Bastia has been in known by libertarians and conservatives ever since but it wasn't always that way and this I want to briefly talk about his background where he came from and you'll have to pardon some of the puns and alliterations I'm going to use like a guy in Gascony because that's how Bastia wrote his writings are full of plays on words and one of the most laborious things I had to do in editing the series was to explain his jokes in English right there's nothing funnier than a footnote that explains a joke so that's a horrible faux pas if you'll pardon the French so where did Bastia come from well as we know Paris is the center of the universe and this is you know he he came from a place that he was born in Bayonne which is in Basque country close to the Spanish border and so he grew up his his grandfather was a business man an importer an exporter and the business suffered terribly under the Napoleonic restrictions of the of during the Napoleonic wars the the other thing that's of note is that Bayonne is is Basque and and the Basque people so stupid they don't understand the benefits of nation states and borders and so they have no respect whatsoever for this artificial line drawn between Spain and France because there are Basque people who live on the northern side and there are Basque people who live on the southern side and they're just trading with their kinfolk and so Bastia grows up in a place where there is constant smuggling which drives the French shun government crazy when he um great his grandfather died his parents died when he's very young when his grandfather dies um when he's when Bastia was 25 he inherits the um his grandfather's estate Edmugran which is a very small place and he lives there for the next 20 years um he's a a local magistrate um his he was his reputation was was a he was a very good magistrate very efficient um he was intellectually curious um and he read for 20 years everything he could lay his hands on in economics in four different languages um French Italian um English and Spanish um and I'll how he got to this interest and this gift with language I'll explain in a moment when he was a young when he was about 14 his grandfather sent him to a college in Sores there was a a Benedictine Abbey in Sores which had um a college and it was a private college and what had happened was that um it was run by the Benedictines it was um turned into a military college in the late um 18th century to train young aristocrats the sons of aristocrats who wanted to go into the army and then during the French the first French revolution in the 1790s um much church property was confiscated and then sold off and some entrepreneurial um educator bought um the land and turned it into a private college and Bastille went to this private college um and this had a transformative experience on him um this is the postcard from the 19th century showing the the college and what happened was that this college was had a reputation when Bastille went there in about 18 um 14 18 15 um the college had 400 students and they came from all over the world mostly from Europe but there was a sizable contingent from England in America which is how Bastille learned English um they had a radical curriculum and they didn't teach um Latin or Greek um they taught modern languages they taught modern literature they taught music um they taught um mathematics and that's where Bastille got this love of reading he he he was a one of the one of the school prize for poetry um he also I think had a photographic memory in that he learned all this stuff this these passages from La Molière and La Fontaine and others and he could recite them uh and did repeatedly both in his his writings and also in his social uh networks so he was involved in various uh liberal salons in Paris when he was living there 1846 to 50 and he used to regale people at these liberal salons with um recitations of um classic works of um French literature but he would also do parodies um impromptu parodies where he would um change the names of some of the characters to uh the names of current politicians and make fun of them um he also learned the cello um at Sores and uh he loved the cello and took it with him and played music all the time which he'd also do at these salons in Paris much to the again the consternation of of some of the more conservative members um he also loves singing and this is where I've called this in vino libertas in wine there is liberty Bastia Beiranger and Bayonne Beiranger was a very important um political songwriter of the period um and so when Bastia leaves the College of Sores and goes back to work in his grandfather's um uh business um he begins to mix with uh liberal groups in Bayonne um at that period though this is in the early 1820s political meetings and parties were strictly banned um so the only way that you could talk this was during the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and there was uh they were trying to restore as much of the old regime as possible and the powers of the aristocracy and the powers of the church and one way that they tried to do that was to stop criticism and that was to prevent people from um discussing politics but people want to talk about politics so they would gather in bars and talk politics secretly but they would also engage in in singing songs political songs um and the places where they would go to sing these songs were bars that specialized in this and they were called gogets and um the people who wrote these political songs and these were best selling items were called Gaugetier and Béranger was one of the best selling Gaugetiers in France and um his books would sell in their thousands he made a comfortable living just writing these songs and he would publish the books with the libretto with the music the score um and the words and the trick was that the um here's some pictures of Gauget of Gauget's this is one by Dormier um and there were even Gauget's just for women these were women who would run their own Gauget's and have gatherings together and run at themselves and so on um and Béranger was a very interesting character who spent considerable time in several times he was input in prison for his ridiculing of Louis Philippe um sorry for Charles the Tent and um one of the songs that was very popular at the time that I'm sure Bastia sang in these Gauget's these these bars was a song in praise of smugglers and this is an illustration from one of the books that Béranger had published with with his songs in it um so that's a page from one of these books and this is Béranger's smuggler's song and I'll just read you the words um I won't sing you'll be pleased to know I won't sing um curse them curse them the revenue men for we bring happiness and wealth the people always toast our health they are indeed our friends yes everywhere the people are our friends yes everywhere everywhere the people are our friends men busy themselves with trade but taxes bar the way let us through exchanges will be made there will be balance this is an economic pun here there will be balance come what may providence protects us everywhere and asks that in return abundance we will share so wealth there is to earn so you can imagine singing songs or maybe you can't imagine yourself singing songs like this in a bar and of course what the police would do is they'd try if they heard people singing these songs um they would break into the bars and try and shut them down um so quite often the people who were singing the songs would have two different versions of the verse right one innocuous and one praising smuggling let's say and then if someone said oh the you know the bad guy the police are coming so they'd switch to the innocuous words and um so this sort of goes on um you know I think well this is all very well charming you know men in these 20s going off to the pub singing songs um what's the practical use of it well this is uh the um the garrison in bayon and in 1830 when bastia was 29 or so uh people that had enough of the reign of charles the 10th and he was um in the process of being overthrown by what would become the july monarchy under louis philippe but the the um the king of france was a bourbon the king of spain was a bourbon the bad the garrison in bayon was in crucial if the spanish bourbon king wanted to send troops to assist his relative the bourbon french king he would have to pass through southern france and so depending on which way the officers in the garrison went they could tip the revolution one way or the other and um bastia being a young liberal mixing in circles in bayon bayon was very keen that louis philippe have a chance to get to the throne and and i get rid of the tyrannical charles the 10th um and so what he does is he um hears that the officers are torn about which way to go whether they should support the the king um to whom they had sworn an oath of allegiance or should they support the revolution that's taking place in paris um and so what bastia does is he goes off with some friends to talk to the officers in the garrison um and they spend the night as one does you know in france is you spend the night drinking red wine and singing songs um and this is and bastia is able to persuade um the officers of the garrison to side with the revolutionaries and not to allow the um support of the bourbon overthrown bourbon king and he writes in his correspondence this is in um the fifth of august 1830 and he says the fifth at midnight i was expecting blood but it was only wine that was spilt the citadel has displayed the tricolor flag the military containment of the midi and talus has been declared has decided that of bayon the regiments down there have displayed the flag thus it is all over this evening we fraternize with garrison officers punch wine liqueurs and above all beiranger contributed largely to the festivities perfect cordiality reigned in this truly patriotic gathering the officers were warmer than we were in the same way as horses which have escaped are more joyful than those that are free so he went there and persuaded through his singing and of these political songs he was able to um participate in the first revolution of his life he was later to participate in the second revolution in 48 so this is the young bastia who you know likes to sing political songs and uh doesn't look as though he's got um anything more intellectually to offer but something happens to him in the 30s which is very interesting this is a another aspect of his um peculiar peculiarities as an individual um i don't know what he looked like before he went to paris the pictures we have of hit were him as a as a deputy a member of the chamber of deputies like the one we i saw showed you at the beginning but i think this is a postcard or a picture from the early 19th century showing how country gentlemen dressed in leiland leiland was the region where he lived and it's very heathy and even marshy in places and these people on stilts is very common in that part of the world um the reason they wore stilts was because of this heath country they were shepherds and the heath was very difficult um to walk through um and they couldn't see the sheep unless they were high higher and so they would wear stilts and they would wear walk around on these stilts and even today um in bayon and other places young men when they have market festivals will have um will get on these stilts and do jousting contests to try and knock each other off their stilts so this is seriously weird stuff but basya was a landowner he had about 250 hectares which is about 500 acres um and he he would have he had sharecroppers working his land he had other tenants and so this is what he might have looked like when he went um uh to inspect his properties and uh he would have had people like that um you know to to talk to about um how they were going and how the business was going and so on um now this is very interesting because um when he goes to paris he refused to wear the traditional clothes of his contemporary economists um they all wore black serious black black hats black coats and basya i think would have looked like this dressed like this country gentleman and there are some very interesting um comments uh by um some of his friends and colleagues when when he died they wrote obituaries of him and would reminisce about him and this is um a reminiscence by molonari um now molonari is an interesting case because he was 20 years younger than basya and molonari lived to be 92 i was born in 1819 and died in i think 1912 and he lived long enough to write obituaries for everyone he knew you know in the economists movement including basya and this is um molonari's recollection of of basya he said um they had basya was work uh molonari was working as a journalist and um the the magazine that he wrote for had reviewed um some of basya's writings very favorably and so basya went to went to visit the office and thank them personally for writing such a nice review and he ended up writing material for them which became some of the economic sophisms so this is molonari's recollection he says um we had a chance to see him when he was making his first rounds of the offices of the journals which had shown themselves to be sympathetic to the free trade cause he still hadn't taken time to visit a parisian tailor or a hatter if he'd ever thought of doing so with his long hair and his small hat his large riding jacket and his oversized umbrella one would have happily taken him for a solid farmer in the middle of sampling the marvels of the capital city but the demeanor of this farmer who was still rough around the edges was impish and witty his large dark eyes were keen and bright his brow was of medium size and somewhat square in shape as if full of ideas and bore the stamp of his thinking at first glance one got the impression that this farmer standing before us came from the country of montaigne gascony and when one's when one heard him speak one immediately recognized in him a disciple of benjamin franklin right they molonari and the other economists greatly admired benjamin franklin as a popularizer of economic ideas and that's how molonari interpreted basya so basya refuses to conform to the dress codes of the economists in paris and he persisted in wearing clothes much like this he eventually possibly as a reward for supporting louis philippe in the revolution of 1830 he was made a magistrate in lugrand which he had for between 1831 and 1845 and this is the postcard of the town square in lugrand this very tiny place only a few hundred people the the sort of canton the larger area around lugrand was only maybe 10 000 people at the most i mean let me just go back and say something more about lugrand when he was in lugrand he was incredibly intellectually curious and from as a result of his going to school in this experimental private school and he and some neighbors set up a book club which they called rather potentially the academy after plato and in the in the academy they would meet every week or so and discuss books that they had read newspaper articles and so on and basya was very important in that circle singing his songs playing his musical instrument but also challenging them constantly with his new ideas so he spends 20 years or more in in lugrand reading all this stuff and then his some of his in some of his correspondence with some of his neighbors and friends they he talks with great fondness about this time when he was free to think and and say anything he liked it's a very important part of his life but something happened to him i think around about 1843 he becomes a bit restless and i'm not quite sure what caused this restlessness perhaps he came across the writings of richard cobden and the anti-coronal league which was underway in in england and he'd read about this in the newspapers and he was really impressed with the strategies and the policies of the anti-coronal league and he eventually of course becomes one of the most important people in the french free trade movement which he leads in 1846 when he living in paris so about 1843 he comes across the writings of richard cobden this may have unsettled him thinking maybe i have something more to contribute maybe i can lead or create and then lead a french free trade movement like cobden has done in england another possibility is that he at this time becomes aware that he has a serious throat condition and i think it is he described about having a pollop in his throat a lump which i suspect was was cancer and they didn't know much about cancer in the 1840s but i think he had a sense that he didn't have a great deal of time left to live and anyway the average lifespan of a working class person male in france at this time was about 46 or 47 and then for someone rich richer like him who was comfortable it might have been 50 so if he's sort of in his 43 44 he may have realized that he didn't have long to live anyway and that with his throat condition he may not have may only have a few years left so he may have decided that i need to do something i need to move out of this the quietness and security of mughran and go to babelon that's the name he he gave paris babelon which if you've been to paris is not far from the truth another possibility is that he with all his reading of economics sort of private reading he might have had thoughts original thoughts in his mind that suggested to him that he had something to say and and that mughran was too much of a confining space and that he had to put it would have taken considerable courage to break from his roots in mughran and move to a foreign city a big city and to make a new life for himself so it's possibly his interest in richard cobson's anti-corneral league perhaps um this fear that he doesn't have much time to live and then a third option is that maybe he thinks he does have some theory in his head that needs to be written down um we don't know of course but that's that's my speculation so he goes to babelon what does babelon look like well this this is an interesting map from 1841 and this is what um busier would have seen he would have perhaps they were just starting to build trains railways um he would have come up from the southwest and you'll notice that there are three rings that surround paris between 1841 and 44 this outer ring of forts was built and this outer ring of a military wall was built because um the prime minister adolf tiere was convinced that the english were going to invade again and that something had to be done for the defences of paris the inner wall is a wall that was built in the 1780s um to help with tax collection this was the octwa wall it was octwa was a city tax anyone entering the city had to go through a barrier or a gate to be inspected and then have to pay taxes on whatever they were bringing into the city there are all sorts of consumer items they had to pay taxes on that wasn't torn down until much later 1859 but these are other forts this was a huge public works construction um they had to reclaim from private owners huge amount of land to build um not just the wall but a road that went inside the wall and then um a couple of hundred yards of clear space so they could have a clear line of fire to shoot the english as they approached on paris and then they built this ring of forts and each of these forts had a certain range for artillery so they could cover the entire area so um this was uh what paris looked like when bastia came there and of course what it is is a wonderful symbol of how the state surrounds us with barriers and walls tax walls military walls and these were the things that really irritated and upset bastia and he wanted to smash all those walls and barricades by having free trade and by cutting military expenditure to the bone um freddy and the free traders this i'll i'll end on this because i'm running out of time and uh but um if i if bastia were to um start a band uh today um i immediately thought of freddy mercury right and then i thought freddy freddy and the free traders what what a great name for a rock band um if he made his name um with the french free trade association which um he was able to set up and work full time for um in 1846 he became the editor and main writer of their magazine uh le livre échange or free trade and it's in the that magazine um that he wrote a lot of the economic sophisms and they were republished in in collected form as the economic sophisms but what he did as a um a journalist and activist for free trade was to invent a whole new what i call a rhetoric of liberty how he wanted to phrase language that would be persuasive to ordinary people who didn't know much about economics why they should support free trade and be opposed to government subsidies and he did this in a very original way which makes him such a great economic journalist um one of the main weapons that he used um was the sting of ridicule that's his expression i want to make fun i want to mock everything the government does in order to show it up for what it really is i want to end all this use of euphemisms to describe what governments do he said we have to call a spade a spade or call a cat a cat and he developed a whole vocabulary which is brilliantly illustrated in the economic sophisms um where he would call the things that the government did um in this harsh very critical way so he he wanted to call every what the government did theft or plunder and he came up with a vocabulary to describe this and so some of the key words that he used over and over again in his writings were words like de puie to dispossess spolier to plunder vole to steal pie to loot or pillage filute to filch and so he had all these um abusive words that he was not afraid to use in order to describe what governments did and in addition to having these words he also invented a whole new way of formulating or presenting his ideas in the form of little plays and dialogues he became an expert at doing this in the economic sophisms he'd have a a stock representative of a free trade position and a stock representative of a protectionist then you have them engage in this um conversation and uh bastia would lead the advocate of protectionism to a reductio absurdum position and then make fun of them and he did this over and over again and that's what makes some of his sophisms so brilliant he would write fake petitions to the government and that's exactly what the petition of the candle makers is but he did several of those um he would do parodies of things like mollier and i wanted to give you an example of this um now just bear with me for a moment because he's doing a parody of a parody and again you have to explain this in multiple footnotes in the book mollier hated doctors right he was suffering from a very bad disease that would eventually kill him he actually died on stage which is always an embarrassment for an actor um anyway so in in the play the hypochondriacs he writes mollier writes an appendix in latin um and then as part of that appendix he has this satirical oath of induction for people who want to become doctors and so these and it this is all in latin and so the latin so this doc would be doctor who wants to be sworn into the fraternities of the medical profession has to swear in public um um um what that means in in english um is i give and grant to you the power and authority to practice medicine to purge to bleed to stab to hack to slash and kill with impunity throughout the whole world so what does bastia do in one of this one of his great he does his own version of this this is a etching um a drawing by dormier showing um louis philippe um as a plunderer gargantua now louis philippe was the king and he had this unfortunate physical shape that he looked like a pair and so all the cartoonists drew him as a pair and so he he would put them in prison and their cartoons would sell more and more cartoonists would draw him as a pair so it was anyway so this is um bastia's parody of molia molia's parody where he says this is the oath of induction for a would-be customs inspector right i'll skip some of the introduction introductory stuff he says volandi piandi derobandi feltandi and escroquandi in punay petotam istam via which in english is i give to you and grant virtue and power to steal to plunder to filch to swindle to defraud at will along this whole road this is very funny but um and that is that is a bastia's style and that is what makes him so endearing i think um to to to readers um so i've just i'll close now and open up for questions but what i wanted to show you was that behind the economic journalist there is another bastia or several bastia's he is a radical um in his style of writing and doing things like these satires and plays on words he's also personally radical and he's different with his clothing and his behavior bursting into song he's constantly quoting molia he was notorious for not just singing political songs but bawdy songs which he would have sung in the bars of bayon um molinari described him as having a rabbalasian wit uh which is a euphemism for saying that he made sexual references constantly in his singing but he's also i think and i haven't gone into this in any detail because i don't have time but i think we can there is a strong case to be made that he was um i call him a proto austrian i don't think he was fully there but he was very very close um and that he has he had in it to in himself he had the the knowledge and the ideas to write a really great book of economic theory but uh his throat cancer killed him before it just finished