Bloomberg versus Bastiat

Yes, friends, it is once again Bastiat Week here at the PDF blog.  I can't help it.  If I had read Bastiat as a youth, I would have become an outlaw economist.

 

In Frederic Bastiat:  A Man Alone, p. 83, Roche quotes the following written by Bastiat as he looked upon the aftermath of the February 1848 revolution that deposed Louis Philippe: 

 … once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the state is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything. If we are happy, it has every right to claim our gratitude; but if we are wretched, it alone is to blame …

The socialists that took control of the French government during Spring 1848 thought to make government, as one of the leaders Louis Blanc said, “[t]he motive force of society…”.  This is exactly the kind of attitude that abounds in Washington today.  People cannot be trusted to be virtuous or honest, charitable or productive.  Government must protect us from our own immoral behavior, our laziness and gluttony, even from our own impure thoughts. 

When New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg tells the people living in, working in, and visiting his city that they are limited to sixteen ounces of their favorite soft drink in any given container, he is merely making visible that pervasive and protective attitude.  The logic is that since government – actually the taxpayers – are funding the cost of medical care for many people, the government can intervene to prevent health problems caused by excess consumption of sugar or fat or sodium or whatever it is that the government deems detrimental at any point in time. 

It is vitally important for us, if we are going resist an intrusive government, that we see how it must be limited and bound right from the start -- as is done in the Constitution.  Once we have said that we would like this or that benefit from the state, we open ourselves to that entity’s control and the imposition of its requirements, which, according to the central power, are always for our best interests, for our good health, to save us money, to make us better, etc. 

Bloomberg’s ban has received substantial support as “sensible” and “reasonable”, and it is, if we are willing to accept the premise that government is the “motive force”.  Most of the educated elite believe this is true.  The bureaucrats, politicians, and regulators either believe it or support it as means to power and control.  I do not believe or accept the premise and neither did Bastiat.  The funny thing is that the fallacy of this approach has been demonstrated time and again in history.  We routinely see it fail before our own eyes here in this country and around the world.  The very global economic crisis we face today is rooted in this idea that central planners in government and finance can create and control wealth better than a free market.  The illusion dissolves before us, yet millions cling to it.  Mock the soda ban all you like, but understand the insidious and destructive lie at the heart of it.

It is a convenient paradox for those who favor democracy that the masses are wise enough to elect their demagogues yet too stupid to act privately in their own best interests.