In his day, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) marveled at the “prodigious mechanism” by which Paris—a city of one million inhabitants in 1845—was constantly supplied with food without the intervention of any central planner. He attributed this spontaneous order to individual interest, “so active, so vigilant, so far-sighted, when it is free in its action.” …

Frédéric Bastiat’s approach to individual self-interest is directly in line with the Scottish Enlightenment of the previous century. These thinkers—such as David Hume and Adam Smith—shared the belief that individual actions motivated by self-interest could lead to beneficial results for society as a whole.

Bastiat firmly believed that this “social harmony” emerges naturally from a natural law that precedes and supersedes all human legislation. These include the natural right to exist, voluntary exchange, and private property. Following in the footsteps of John Locke, he recognized the existence of natural rights in the conditions of human development, essentially that of property (starting with self-ownership) and its corollary, exchange. It’s worth noting this vision of natural law, on which Murray Rothbard also bases part of his thinking. He also recognized the importance of Bastiat and the French laissez-faire tradition as important precursors of the Austrian School and modern libertarianism. …

Here Bastiat makes one of the first economic, not just moral, criticisms of political interventionism and socialism, which he describes as having “two elements: the frenzy of contradiction, and the madness of pride!” On these last points, Bastiat seems to be a precursor of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who—a century later—would develop similar ideas on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism and the dangers of centralized economic decision-making.

Bastiat also criticizes the “fatal conceit” of rulers who—lured by the arrogance of reason—believe themselves capable of shaping the world and the economy to their own liking. A hubris that prevents them from recognizing the complexity of the economic process, and which makes the individual alone—with his or her subjective needs—the beginning and the end of this process. In his time, Bastiat—like Alexis de Tocqueville—had already understood that socialism “send[s] civilization back.”