Frédéric Bastiat

1801–1850 French statesman and economist

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

Biography

Claude-Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal economist and statesman who, in a writing career compressed into the last six years of his life, produced some of the most enduring economic prose in any language. The Law remains the clearest single statement of the proper boundaries of state coercion. That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen introduced the now-canonical "broken window fallacy" — the demonstration that destruction can never produce net wealth, no matter how much immediate economic activity it generates. Bastiat served briefly in the French National Assembly during the 1848 revolutions before tuberculosis killed him at 49.

Major Works

The Law (1850)
Economic Sophisms (1845)
That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen (1850)
Economic Harmonies (1850)

The Bitcoin Connection

Bastiat's framework — that legitimate property rights are prior to government, that taxation beyond the protection of those rights is plunder, that visible benefits often hide invisible costs — applies almost mechanically to inflation as a form of disguised taxation. Bitcoin makes Bastiat's case operational at the protocol level: a money whose supply schedule is fixed in code can't be inflated by a state that wants to tax invisibly. The "broken window" framing also clarifies why Keynesian "stimulus" funded by money creation is not free — the inflation tax falls invisibly on every saver. Bitcoin removes the option.