When asked who his favorite economist was, Ronald Reagan used to say Fredric Bastiat.
Bastiat, pointed out, the task is to look for what is unseen, what is hidden.
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For we are therefore stating that both Frederic Bastiat and Joan Robinson did not understand Econ 101.
One of my heroes is Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), a French advocate of free trade and free enterprise.
Just as importantly, Bastiat recognized that equivalence was not fixed or even defined.
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Bastiat has been dead for 155 years, but he knew all about multipliers.
Frederic Bastiat, the best economist most people never heard of, was born on June 30, 1801, in Bayonne France.
The last Frenchman known to understand the economics of anything was Frederic Bastiat and he died in 1850.
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As Hazlitt and Bastiat before him have shown, war is a boon for some but a disaster for everyone else.
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The great French political economist Fredric Bastiat long ago observed that for laws to be effective, they must be credible.
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The Bastiat Prize was developed to encourage and reward writers whose published works promote the institutions of a free society.
Taking his cue from the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat, Hazlitt tells the story of a vandal who breaks a bakery window.
Was it right to do so, or is He, as Smith and Bastiat and many others seemed to believe, foundational to the free-market order?
As the Bastiat Prize attests, the insights to be shared are as relevant as today's news, but as enduring as a free society's institutions.
It beats smashing windows, but I think Bastiat might have come up with another way to attract visitors to New York: Repeal the 13.6% hotel occupancy tax.
Bastiat points out the fallacy: You've forgotten that the money spent on the window is money the shopkeeper might otherwise have spent at the cobbler.
Bastiat pointed out all the jobs that would be created in the candle and related industries, including multiplier effects, if this unfair competition were eliminated.
To explain this in easy-to-understand terms, Bastiat referenced a broken window.
Bastiat pointed out that the fallacy in this line of reasoning was in confusing a diversion of spending that would have taken place with new spending.
This translation project is headed by a wonderful Frenchman named Jacques de Guenin, who has devoted much of his life to keeping the memory of Bastiat alive.
She recently won the inaugural Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism.
What we get to in the end is what Frederic Bastiat (one of the few Frenchmen ever to actually get economics) tried to tell us all 160 years ago.
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The greatest economic educator ever, in my opinion, was Frederick Bastiat, a French economist of the first half of the 19th century who would likely be labeled a Libertarian today.
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Bastiat died before the marginal revolution this might even be fair but claiming that Professor Robinson, one of the most fiercely intelligent economists ever, did not is a brave statement to make.
Large hurricanes, like Sandy, can create clean-up jobs and stimulate GDP growth, although, as Bastiat pointed out in his Broken Window Fallacy, much of the spending will be diverted spending rather than net new spending.
So, the next couple of items on my list were from Bastiat: the petition of the candle makers, the negative railroad, and the broken window fallacy, which led in to his discussion of the seen versus the unseen.
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In 2005 Ms. O'Grady won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism awarded by the International Policy Network for her articles on the World Bank, the underground economy in Brazil and the bad economic advice the U.S. often gives to Latin American countries.
Economics students usually hear of Bastiat first via his famous Petition on Behalf of the French Candle Makers, where he, tongue-in cheek, implored the French Parliament to require the closure of all blinds, shutters, etc. because sunlight was providing unfair competition to the candle makers in the provision of light.
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