|
 No one
traveling in hostile country should ever be without reliable protection. When
the territory in question is intellectual, it always helps to have the aid of
fighters who've been there before. In fact, two of the most seasoned pros are
yours for only the cost of the effort required to understand their arguments.
Fortunately, these straight-shooting writers have made that cost minimal.
I'm
speaking of Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and Frederic Bastiat
(1801–1850). Both were skilled polemicists. If they had been
contemporaries they might have gotten along as famously as Doc Holliday and
Wyatt Earp. Paine's major works were mostly political and religious polemics,
while Bastiat was a skilled debunker of economic fallacies and a great economic theorist.
Though much could be written about their differences, they shared a strong
intellectual similarity. Consider the following:
- Both
men were plain-speaking champions of liberty whose works are timeless. You
can download their writing at no charge from Mises.org.
- Both
men rose from obscurity relatively late in life, through the power of their
writing. Paine didn't become known to the world until he was 39; Bastiat,
until he was in his mid-40s.
- Both
men were mostly self-educated. Neither completed school. Paine left at age 12
to serve a standard seven-year apprenticeship in his father's corset-making
trade. Bastiat quit at 17 to work in his uncle's counting house — and
because he could no longer stand school. Bastiat was severely critical of
French education throughout his life.
- Both
men took considerable physical risks to fight for their ideas. After
publishing Common Sense
in early 1776 and thereby inducing the Continental Congress to declare American
independence, Paine joined Washington's army. As the Americans were fleeing
across the New Jersey countryside following their narrow escape from New York
City, Paine spent his evenings writing the first and best-known of his American Crisis
papers. "These are the times that try men's souls," it began.
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the
triumph."
In the late afternoon of Christmas
Day, 1776, in a desperate effort to boost troop morale, Washington instructed
his officers to summon the men into squads and read Paine's essay to them.
The following morning, after marching his troops through the night in a
blizzard, Washington surprised the Hessians at Trenton and staked claim to
his first victory in the war.
In 1848, Bastiat was often the
lone defender of freedom in the midst of a bloody revolution in Paris that
demanded more intrusive government.
- Both
men saw liberty as the only condition compatible with human nature, lasting
prosperity, and peace — though Bastiat was far more consistent than
Paine. During his stay in France in the 1790s, Paine found Rousseau's
collectivism somewhat appealing. Bastiat dismembered it at every
opportunity.
- Both
men identified government as an institution of plunder and enslavement, and
fought to change it. Once again, Bastiat's deeper understanding of free
markets kept him more consistently on the side of liberty.
- Both
made a sharp distinction between government and society — between the
predatory and productive sectors.
- Both
men condemned government paper money, and both championed specie.
- Both
were prodigious writers. Some of Bastiat's writings are still awaiting
translation from their original French.
- Because
of their passion for liberty and their ability to breathe fire into their
prose, both men are among the most quotable authors ever.
A few
excerpts will help illuminate the extent of their intellectual affinity.
On
Government
Paine:
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its
worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the
same miseries by a
government, which we might expect in a country without government,
our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which
we suffer." Common
Sense (1776)
Bastiat:
"As it is certain, on the one hand, that we are all making some similar
request to the Government; and as, on the other, it is proved that Government
cannot satisfy one party without adding to the labor of the others, until I
can obtain another definition of the word Government, I feel authorized to
give it my own.… Government is that great fiction, through which
everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." "Government"
(1848)
Legal
Plunder
Paine:
"The conqueror considered the conquered, not as his prisoner, but as his
property. He led him in triumph, rattling in chains, and doomed him, at
pleasure, to slavery or death. As time obliterated the history of their
beginning, their successors assumed new appearances, to cut off the entail of
their disgrace, but their principles and objects remained the same. What at
first was plunder, assumed the softer name of revenue; and the power
originally usurped, they affected to inherit." Rights of Man, Part 2,
Chapter 2 (1792)
Bastiat:
"When successful soldiers used to reduce the vanquished to slavery, they
were barbarous, but they were not irrational. Their object, like ours, was to
live at other people's expense, and they did not fail to do so. What are we
to think of a people who never seem to suspect that reciprocal plunder is
no less plunder because it is reciprocal." "Government" (1848)
On
Limited Government
Paine:
"Government on the old system is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement
of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of
society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter
promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation. The one
encourages national prejudices; the other promotes universal society, as the
means of universal commerce. The one measures its prosperity, by the quantity
of revenue it extorts; the other proves its excellence, by the small quantity
of taxes it requires." Rights
of Man, Part 2, Chapter 2 (1792)
Bastiat:
"Cast your eye over the globe. Which are the happiest, the most moral,
and the most peaceable nations? Those where the law interferes the least with
private activity; where the Government is the least felt; where individuality
has the most scope, and public opinion the most influence." "The
Law" (1850)
On
Paper Money
Paine:
"One of the evils of paper money is that it turns the whole country into
stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate
continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect.
Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice,
and party; and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to
raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the
morals of the country." Dissertations
on Government (1786)
Bastiat:
"Do you believe that if it were merely needful to print bank-notes in
order to satisfy all our wants, our tastes, and desires, that mankind would
have been contented to go on till now without having recourse to this plan? I
agree with you that the discovery is tempting. It would immediately banish
from the world, not only plunder, in its diversified and deplorable forms,
but even labor itself, except in the National Printing Bureau."
"What is Money?" (1849)
On
Religion and War
Paine:
"Some Christians pretend that Christianity was not established by the
sword; but of what period of time do they speak? It was impossible that
twelve men could begin with the sword; they had not the power; but no sooner
were the professors of Christianity sufficiently powerful to employ the sword
than they did so, and the stake and fagot, too." The Age of Reason,
Part 2 (1795)
Bastiat:
"Is there a more potent moral influence than religion? Has there ever
been a religion more favorable to peace or more universally received than
Christianity? And yet what has been witnessed during eighteen centuries? Men
have gone out to battle, not merely in spite of religion, but in the very
name of religion." "Natural History of Spoliation," Economic Sophisms
(1848)
On the
Persecution of Liberty
Paine:
"This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil
and religious liberty from every Part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not
from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster;
and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first
emigrants from home pursues their descendants still." Common Sense (1776)
Bastiat:
"O Liberty! we have seen thee hunted from country to country, crushed by
conquest, groaning under slavery, insulted in courts, banished from schools,
laughed at in saloons, misunderstood in workshops, denounced in churches. It
seems thou shouldst find in thought an inviolable refuge. But if thou art to
surrender in this thy last asylum, what becomes of the hopes of ages, and the
boasted courage of the human race?" Economic
Harmonies, Book I (1850)
On
Education and Beliefs
Paine:
"Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, which the
Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the
same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a
people to believe that priests or any other class of men can forgive sins,
and you will have sins in abundance." "Worship and Church Bells: A
Letter to Camille Jordan" (1797)
Bastiat:
"As soon as we are seven or eight years old, what does the State do? It
puts a blindfold over our eyes, takes us gently from the midst of the social
circle that surrounds us, to plunge us, with our susceptible faculties, our
impressible hearts, into the midst of Roman society. It keeps us there for
ten years at least, long enough to make an indelible impression on the brain.
Now
observe, that Roman society is directly opposed to what our society ought to
be. There they lived upon war; here we ought to hate war; there they hated
labor; here we ought to live upon labor. There the means of subsistence were
founded upon slavery and plunder; here they should be drawn from free
industry.… The very words liberty, order, justice, people, honor,
influence, etc., could not have the same signification at Rome as they have,
or ought to have, at Paris.… How can you expect [our youth] to take the
slightest interest in the mechanism of our social order?" "What is
Money?" (1849)
Paine's
Inconsistency
During
his stay in France during the 1790s, Paine unfortunately developed a limited
fondness for collectivist thinking. Thus, in the Rights of Man, for example, Paine details
how government should "pay to every such person of the age of fifty
years, and until he shall arrive at the age of sixty, the sum of six pounds
per annum out of the surplus taxes; and ten pounds per annum during life,
after the age of sixty." This is the same author who in footnote 23 of Rights of Man observed
that "It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not
suggest an allusion to some corruption in governments."
For
Bastiat, on the other hand, the principle of voluntary association was always the starting
point for discussing any social proposal. In writing about socialist
visionaries, he says,
I am
not contesting their right to invent social orders, to disseminate their
proposals, to advise their adoption, and to experiment with them on
themselves, at their own expense and risk; but I do indeed contest their
right to impose them on us by law, that is, by the use of the police force
and public funds.
Paine
was no doubt sincere in his support for state-provided welfare, yet at the
end of his life it was not welfarism for which he wanted to be remembered,
but his contribution to American liberty. In his will, he states that the
place where he is to be buried should have "a headstone with my name and
age engraved upon it, author of 'Common Sense.'"
As
champions of liberty, Paine and Bastiat threw the covers off the fallacies
and institutions that stood in the way of its realization. Both writers
bequeathed to us arsenals of intellectual ammunition that will always be
deadly to statism.
George F. Smith
Read his book : The
Flight of the Barbarous Relic
Visit his website
Read his blog
Also
by George F. Smith
George F. Smith is the author of The Flight of the
Barbarous Relic, a novel about a renegade Fed chairman and the editor of
Barbarous Relic.com.
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