Happy 204th Birthday to Frédéric Bastiat

Bastiat was a 19th century champion of free society, firmly allied with the likes of Locke in advocating a political philosophy rooted in natural law:

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

He exposed the folly behind much of our mixed economy in his example of the Broken Window and pioneered demonstrating absurdity by being absurd with the Negative Railroad (scroll down) and the Petition of the Candlestickmakers.

For more see Sheldon Richman's annotated bibliography.