11 ms·

Candlestick Makers' Petition (1845)

89 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

jvm 5y ago
Evergreen
voldacar 5y ago
IMHO, there is a particular clarity of thought in Bastiat's writing that makes him superior to Anglosphere classical liberal authors, at least as far as economics is concerned.
- tomcam 5y ago
  This prose is incredibly good in its English form. Is it due to an excellent translator, or Bastiat's clarity that made the translation easy?
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    There's a third option, at least, that the translator has not translated the nuance of the French and so [inadvertently?] simplified the writing. My French isn't really good enough to tell, but the semi-gratuité appeared to me as if it's probably an untranslated pun. Thankfully they link the source which says "you'll get a demi-gratuitë". My best guess is that a gratuité is a reference to schooling as it may be from a period where schooling was starting to be given for free. So it's a burn, "you'll get a half-free/be half educated". After in brackets it says something like "pardon pour le mot", but I suspect this is read in the French as "sorry for the pun" (motte-juste sp? = pun??) and the meaning in vernacular English is then [if I'm right!] definitely "shall I call you an ambulance for that burn". As a UK-ian I enjoyed the reference to Perfidious Albion (though note the capitalisation, as it's all a name in UK we capitalise it all but that's not French practice for such a term; this is changing in UK English though). So, yeah, great read though, either way. (FWIW I don't think any of this catches much light on the implicit question of my first paragraph.)
    - Zababa 5y ago
      As a French native, I don't see any pun in "demi-gratuité", but I may be missing some context. "you'll get a half-free/be half educated" seems like a stretch. > As a UK-ian I enjoyed the reference to Perfidious Albion (though note the capitalisation, as it's all a name in UK we capitalise it all but that's not French practice for such a term; this is changing in UK English though). The name is just "Albion", "perfidious" here is just an adjective like any other. We use "Grande Bretagne" for Great Britain. Notice the two capital letters.
      - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
        No, Perfidious Albion is the whole name, my French teacher said such capitalisation of adjectives wasn't done in French. Country names are a special case. It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). I can't really add anything further. I'm open to being wrong.
        Zababa 5y ago
        The thing is that Albion alone is also a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion. Most of the references in the French wikipedia article on Perfidious Albion don't capitalize "Perfidious" either: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion. > It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) That's how it works I think (although we would say "voitures françaises" because "une voiture" is feminine but that's a detail). > If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). That's true, but Albion by itself is also a reference, while Alliance by itself is not. For example, we also have the "Triple Alliance", which is another alliance, but we don't have another Albion. The perfidious Albion and Albion both refer to the same thing. I'm far from being an expert in French though, I'm only a native speaker, so I might be totally wrong about specific points like this.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    It is great in French too. The style is a bit dated, but the thought is very clear and easy to understand, and it's a fun read.
advisedwang 5y ago
Classic all or nothing thinking. You must pick between producer and consumer, and no balance can be struck. If any regulation is bad, we have to get rid of all regulation. If growth is good, we have to grow at any cost.
- freeopinion 5y ago
  Coincidentally, David Ricardo's argument against England's Corn Laws a generation earlier (again dealing with import restrictions) gave birth to the economic theory of comparative advantage. A simple example of this argument does lead to all or nothing and makes a very strong mathematical argument that anything else would be disadvantageous.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Could you unpack that further? What’s the mathematical argument?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - freeopinion 5y ago
      Alice can grow 20 tons of apples or 15 tons of pumpkins for Halloween. Bob can grow 15 tons of apples or 10 tons of pumpkins. The opportunity cost to Alice of growing 1 ton of apples is 3/4 ton of pumpkins. The opportunity cost to Alice for growing one ton of pumpkins is 4/3 tons of apples. The opportunity cost to Bob of growing 1 ton of apples is 2/3 ton of pumpkin. For 1 ton of pumpkin it is 3/2 tons of apples. It costs Alice more to grow apples than it costs Bob: 3/4 vs 2/3. It costs Bob more to grow pumpkins than it costs Alice: 3/2 vs 4/3. Although Alice can grow both crops better than Bob can, it is in both their interests to have Alice specialize in pumpkins while Bob specializes in apples. In this simple example--with no other real-life considerations--all or nothing is better for both.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
HPsquared 5y ago
Major parallels with the parable of the broken window, which it turns out is also from Bastiat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  It's there too[1], in the full version. 1: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  seems like the seed of an argument against disposable goods.
gaoshan 5y ago
This reminds me of today's politicians opposing green energy. Some of the same sorts of arguments only our folks aren't doing it satirically.
pwned1 5y ago
I recently had the privilege of visiting Bastiat's grave in Rome.
elmomle 5y ago
While satirical discourses can make for fun reading, they often obscure the complexity of the issue at hand and need to be taken with a heaping pile of salt. Here is a counter-analogy to the one advanced in this letter: Imagine a world where each nation is essentially a person (this isn't strictly necessary, but the intuition to follow comes more easily when we think of our own lives, where we have a great deal more experience). Now let's say that Carla is a more efficient farmer, miner, and homebuilder than I, and that she has agreed to help me with those matters in exchange for some of my money. In a world where all people are benevolent and will provide stable help in perpetuity, this is a fine bargain; but in any other case it requires much more scrutiny. My money reserves are finite, but my need for food and resources stretches into the temporal horizon. Then I need to very carefully evaluate whether my sources of revenue are sufficient and sufficiently stable to sustain this agreement; I need to have a good backup plan if Carla can't come through for me in a time of need; and further, I need to be very assured that Carla and I won't come into later conflict in which she would be advantaged by suddenly withholding her goods and services. This isn't to argue entirely in favor of domestic self-sufficiency; there's plenty of evidence that an interdependent web of trade correlates with greater international stability and peace, which (all else being equal) seems good. The point, however, is that the issue is really very nuanced. How sure are you that your dependence on another nation is a safe and stable dependency? What's the damage, and how quickly can you adapt, if the status quo changes? Those questions are entirely irrelevant when discussing the sun's impact on producers of light--the sun is (on our timescale) stable and has no motives. So while this bit of writing may be a good counterpoint to some minor point in the debate in which it's situated, it really seems overly reductive in the broader context of international trade.
- SkittyDog 5y ago
  > Imagine a world where each nation is essentially a person... I gonna stop you right there, pardner. The first objection to protectionist legislation is that it benefits certain people in our country (the producers of X) by hurting the interests of other people in our same country. Because you've analogized an entire country as a single person, your analogy is by definition incapable of addressing this problem.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
In his final work (Harmonies économiques, 1850) Bastiat claims that the basis of economic liberty is economic harmony. Interesting, because this connects the philosophy of capitalism to the philosophy of Communist China (to advance a “harmonious society”). Sure, why not? Here is Bastiat: “The conclusion of the Economists is for Liberty. But in order that this conclusion should take hold of men’s minds and hearts, it must be solidly based on this fundamental principle, that interests, left to themselves, tend to harmonious combinations, and to the progressive preponderance of the general good.”
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  And, in 1851, Abraham Lincoln’s chief economic advisor, Henry Charles Carey, published his own book on economic harmony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Charles_Carey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Charles_Carey Carey used harmony to refer to many phenomena, like how increased worker wages leads to benefits for owners. It’s lovely stuff. This systems-level beauty seems absent from contemporary economic schools of thought.
  - sonofhans 5y ago
    > systems-level beauty I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the hordes screaming “SHAREHOLDER VALUE!” I agree with you, FWIW, and think you put it in a nice way.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  Wait... The word "harmonious" has been used once in two different translations to english, and so suddenly Bastiat has an ideology close to the one of communist china!?
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    Yes! Everything that can be reduced to a word cloud will be reduced to a word cloud. Then, those things that can't be reduced to a word cloud will be reduced anyways, and no one will know the better, since word cloud comparisons is what they'll check.

89 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

jvm 5y ago

Evergreen

IMHO, there is a particular clarity of thought in Bastiat's writing that makes him superior to Anglosphere classical liberal authors, at least as far as economics is concerned.

tomcam 5y ago
This prose is incredibly good in its English form. Is it due to an excellent translator, or Bastiat's clarity that made the translation easy?
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  There's a third option, at least, that the translator has not translated the nuance of the French and so [inadvertently?] simplified the writing. My French isn't really good enough to tell, but the semi-gratuité appeared to me as if it's probably an untranslated pun. Thankfully they link the source which says "you'll get a demi-gratuitë". My best guess is that a gratuité is a reference to schooling as it may be from a period where schooling was starting to be given for free. So it's a burn, "you'll get a half-free/be half educated". After in brackets it says something like "pardon pour le mot", but I suspect this is read in the French as "sorry for the pun" (motte-juste sp? = pun??) and the meaning in vernacular English is then [if I'm right!] definitely "shall I call you an ambulance for that burn". As a UK-ian I enjoyed the reference to Perfidious Albion (though note the capitalisation, as it's all a name in UK we capitalise it all but that's not French practice for such a term; this is changing in UK English though). So, yeah, great read though, either way. (FWIW I don't think any of this catches much light on the implicit question of my first paragraph.)
  - Zababa 5y ago
    As a French native, I don't see any pun in "demi-gratuité", but I may be missing some context. "you'll get a half-free/be half educated" seems like a stretch. > As a UK-ian I enjoyed the reference to Perfidious Albion (though note the capitalisation, as it's all a name in UK we capitalise it all but that's not French practice for such a term; this is changing in UK English though). The name is just "Albion", "perfidious" here is just an adjective like any other. We use "Grande Bretagne" for Great Britain. Notice the two capital letters.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      No, Perfidious Albion is the whole name, my French teacher said such capitalisation of adjectives wasn't done in French. Country names are a special case. It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). I can't really add anything further. I'm open to being wrong.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        The thing is that Albion alone is also a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion. Most of the references in the French wikipedia article on Perfidious Albion don't capitalize "Perfidious" either: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfide_Albion. > It's certainly true that geonyms don't use capitals, in French: you'd say, I think, voitures français whilst we say French cars. (True?) That's how it works I think (although we would say "voitures françaises" because "une voiture" is feminine but that's a detail). > If I referenced the Scottish Alliance [with France] (the Auld Alliance) then it's capitalised to show it's a specific reference, not just any old alliance. Bastiat isn't [just] calling Britain perfidious he's referencing a specific term (or I guess he's ignorant and this is a massive coincidence!?). That's true, but Albion by itself is also a reference, while Alliance by itself is not. For example, we also have the "Triple Alliance", which is another alliance, but we don't have another Albion. The perfidious Albion and Albion both refer to the same thing. I'm far from being an expert in French though, I'm only a native speaker, so I might be totally wrong about specific points like this.
- Zababa 5y ago
  It is great in French too. The style is a bit dated, but the thought is very clear and easy to understand, and it's a fun read.

advisedwang 5y ago

Classic all or nothing thinking. You must pick between producer and consumer, and no balance can be struck. If any regulation is bad, we have to get rid of all regulation. If growth is good, we have to grow at any cost.

freeopinion 5y ago
Coincidentally, David Ricardo's argument against England's Corn Laws a generation earlier (again dealing with import restrictions) gave birth to the economic theory of comparative advantage. A simple example of this argument does lead to all or nothing and makes a very strong mathematical argument that anything else would be disadvantageous.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Could you unpack that further? What’s the mathematical argument?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    Alice can grow 20 tons of apples or 15 tons of pumpkins for Halloween. Bob can grow 15 tons of apples or 10 tons of pumpkins. The opportunity cost to Alice of growing 1 ton of apples is 3/4 ton of pumpkins. The opportunity cost to Alice for growing one ton of pumpkins is 4/3 tons of apples. The opportunity cost to Bob of growing 1 ton of apples is 2/3 ton of pumpkin. For 1 ton of pumpkin it is 3/2 tons of apples. It costs Alice more to grow apples than it costs Bob: 3/4 vs 2/3. It costs Bob more to grow pumpkins than it costs Alice: 3/2 vs 4/3. Although Alice can grow both crops better than Bob can, it is in both their interests to have Alice specialize in pumpkins while Bob specializes in apples. In this simple example--with no other real-life considerations--all or nothing is better for both.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago

HPsquared 5y ago

Major parallels with the parable of the broken window, which it turns out is also from Bastiat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
It's there too[1], in the full version. 1: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
FPGAhacker 5y ago
seems like the seed of an argument against disposable goods.

gaoshan 5y ago

This reminds me of today's politicians opposing green energy. Some of the same sorts of arguments only our folks aren't doing it satirically.

pwned1 5y ago

I recently had the privilege of visiting Bastiat's grave in Rome.

elmomle 5y ago

While satirical discourses can make for fun reading, they often obscure the complexity of the issue at hand and need to be taken with a heaping pile of salt. Here is a counter-analogy to the one advanced in this letter: Imagine a world where each nation is essentially a person (this isn't strictly necessary, but the intuition to follow comes more easily when we think of our own lives, where we have a great deal more experience). Now let's say that Carla is a more efficient farmer, miner, and homebuilder than I, and that she has agreed to help me with those matters in exchange for some of my money. In a world where all people are benevolent and will provide stable help in perpetuity, this is a fine bargain; but in any other case it requires much more scrutiny. My money reserves are finite, but my need for food and resources stretches into the temporal horizon. Then I need to very carefully evaluate whether my sources of revenue are sufficient and sufficiently stable to sustain this agreement; I need to have a good backup plan if Carla can't come through for me in a time of need; and further, I need to be very assured that Carla and I won't come into later conflict in which she would be advantaged by suddenly withholding her goods and services. This isn't to argue entirely in favor of domestic self-sufficiency; there's plenty of evidence that an interdependent web of trade correlates with greater international stability and peace, which (all else being equal) seems good. The point, however, is that the issue is really very nuanced. How sure are you that your dependence on another nation is a safe and stable dependency? What's the damage, and how quickly can you adapt, if the status quo changes? Those questions are entirely irrelevant when discussing the sun's impact on producers of light--the sun is (on our timescale) stable and has no motives. So while this bit of writing may be a good counterpoint to some minor point in the debate in which it's situated, it really seems overly reductive in the broader context of international trade.

SkittyDog 5y ago
> Imagine a world where each nation is essentially a person... I gonna stop you right there, pardner. The first objection to protectionist legislation is that it benefits certain people in our country (the producers of X) by hurting the interests of other people in our same country. Because you've analogized an entire country as a single person, your analogy is by definition incapable of addressing this problem.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

In his final work (Harmonies économiques, 1850) Bastiat claims that the basis of economic liberty is economic harmony. Interesting, because this connects the philosophy of capitalism to the philosophy of Communist China (to advance a “harmonious society”). Sure, why not? Here is Bastiat: “The conclusion of the Economists is for Liberty. But in order that this conclusion should take hold of men’s minds and hearts, it must be solidly based on this fundamental principle, that interests, left to themselves, tend to harmonious combinations, and to the progressive preponderance of the general good.”

dr_dshiv 5y ago
And, in 1851, Abraham Lincoln’s chief economic advisor, Henry Charles Carey, published his own book on economic harmony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Charles_Carey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Charles_Carey Carey used harmony to refer to many phenomena, like how increased worker wages leads to benefits for owners. It’s lovely stuff. This systems-level beauty seems absent from contemporary economic schools of thought.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  > systems-level beauty I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the hordes screaming “SHAREHOLDER VALUE!” I agree with you, FWIW, and think you put it in a nice way.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
Wait... The word "harmonious" has been used once in two different translations to english, and so suddenly Bastiat has an ideology close to the one of communist china!?
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Yes! Everything that can be reduced to a word cloud will be reduced to a word cloud. Then, those things that can't be reduced to a word cloud will be reduced anyways, and no one will know the better, since word cloud comparisons is what they'll check.