What are Ron Paul's favorite books? Near the top of the list is French writer Frédéric Bastiat, whose "The Law" is one of the best introduction to libertarian thought.
What are Ron Paul's favorite books? Near the top of the list is French writer Frédéric Bastiat, whose "The Law" is one of the best introduction to libertarian thought.
What are Ron Paul's favorite books? Near the top of the list is French writer Frédéric Bastiat, whose "The Law" is one of the best introduction to libertarian thought.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
Daniel McAdams is with me today.
Daniel, nice to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
Daniel, I'd like to talk today a little bit about a favorite book of mine.
There's been many books that have influenced me, and I don't have one that is the most important one.
But this is the book that came to my mind when I was asked on national TV, what book is a good book to influence people with the libertarian ideas.
And the first thought came to my mind was the book called The Law.
And that was written by Frederick Bastiat in 1870.
So this is the booklet.
You know, here it is.
It's not very big, 75 pages.
And it's fantastic, and we want to talk about that a little bit.
But I want to contrast that with another book that had a lot of influence, but not one that is going to be read by everybody who's especially just getting interested in free market economics and libertarianism.
And this is Human Action by Mises.
I mean, look at the size of this thing.
I mean, it took me even a couple days to read it.
But it took me, actually, it probably took me a couple years, but I did get through it.
But there's a lot of material in there.
So this isn't where people start, but it's always there for research, and it's going to be around for hundreds of years, even though they mistreated Mises the whole time he came to America after he escaped from the Nazis in the 1940s.
Anyway, The Law is a neat little book, and it was written by Bastiat, who unfortunately died at the age of 49, had tuberculosis.
He was French, but his life is interesting too.
He became an orphan at an early age and lived with family.
But later on, he actually inherited a lot of money and could be independent and got interested in economics.
And actually, two years before he died, he was in the French Assembly.
But he did unbelievably good work in this short period of time.
And the best-known book is The Law.
And for me, it's important because it deals with a basic moral principle.
And very simply, there's other things we want to mention, but the thing that I remember is he summarizes this by saying, governments should never be permitted to do anything that you and I can't do, which means you and I can't steal, we can't counterfeit money, we can't do this.
Yet governments do this all the time.
And he was very, very clear on this.
The purpose of government was to protect person, liberty, and property.
Very, very narrow.
So he was obviously very much of an believe in natural law.
But I am sure you came across some of his writings.
I know you read Henry Hazlitt, and he introduces a lot of people to Bastiat and The Law.
And I was a bit of a latecomer, I have to say.
It really wasn't until I started working for you that I started looking at some of the philosophy.
And I did start by reading Hazlitt, which is such a wonderful book.
It's such easy reading.
I like what you said earlier.
You don't have to take a huge meal.
You can take a little hors d'oeuvre.
But reading Hazlitt was when I first came across the broken window fallacy that Bastiat had put forth.
And that was fascinating to me.
Yeah, and you know, it makes so much sense, but it's being violated constantly.
And the one thing that came out of the broken window parable was the fact that he was demonstrating what they call opportunity costs.
You know, if you spend your money fixing a broken window, everybody thinks that's wonderful.
We gave jobs to people.
But you end up with just the broken window being fixed, but you never talk about, well, what happened to the, what would have happened to the money?
And he suggests maybe somebody would have had a nice suit or something like that.
So it's opportunity cost.
Matter of fact, they didn't use that term back then, but Henry Hazlitt did.
And the Austrian economists use that frequently now of opportunity costs.
So if you're misdirected by regulations or inflation or all of these things, there could be much better expenditures.
And that's why central economic planning is not a good idea.
But very simply, as you know, since you've read this story on the broken window, the story is that he goes through this, somebody breaks the window, and he goes through and tries to explain all the benefits from this.
And it doesn't turn out that there are any real benefits other than the fact you get back you get back to normal.
But don't you think we could apply that to building a bomb?
Exactly.
You know, it does employ people, but actually you hardly get back to normal because when it's used, you have additional expenses.
So you have the expenses building it and cleaning up after, which is what the U.S. often does.
We pay to bomb them, then we pay to clean it up.
And then we end up with more enemies.
So, yes, the bombing is much worse than a broken window.
And then, see, the peace dividend, that was the greatest disappointment I think that so many of us had was there was no peace benefit dividend when the Soviet system collapsed.
But what was so good about what Bastiat did was he told it in stories.
Parables evidently is a good tool, and making a little fun is a good way to do it too.
And he has a book, it's called Sophisms, Bastiat's Sophism, and these are sort of parables.
But one that I thought was rather interesting is that he says, oh, government's there to make jobs.
You know, that's what we want the Republicans and Democrats.
How are you going to create jobs?
I'm going to create more jobs than anybody else.
So he comes up with the, you know, the theoretical suggestion.
Well, the candle makers have a petition, and they say what we need to do in order to hire more people and make more money is that we need to block out the sun.
So that is so ridiculous, but it makes a point.
Yeah, block out the sun.
You're not allowed to have shades on your windows.
More candles will be sold.
Employment rates will go up.
But will people be more prosperous and happy?
Obviously not.
It's a joke.
But there was another one about the right hand.
Did you come across that story ever?
That's a great one.
Cut off, you know, the increase of labor force.
You're not allowed to use, you're not allowed to use your right hand.
You have to cut it off.
No, they weren't into cutting off hands, but they just said that if everybody was compelled, prohibited from using their right hand, he was assuming everybody was right-handed.
But if you just use your dominant hand, they're not allowed to use your dominant hand, everything would slow up.
Rights Over Group Laws00:03:11
It would take longer to build a building.
So everybody would be employed and they wouldn't have to worry about it.
So those kind of things, you know, are so silly, but it calls attention to it.
But once again, I think the really important thing was arguing the case about governments not being able to do anything.
But governments break laws all the time.
Don't you think our FBI and a few other government agents are breaking laws all the time?
That's what they do.
That's what they do for a living.
They're supposed to protect us, you know.
You know, what struck me about Bastiat, he talked about the natural state of man, and man naturally has his life and his property before the law.
These are not created by laws, they exist before law, and law exists to protect those.
If you think about it philosophically, it's such a powerful thought.
Yeah, and that would obviously put him into the whole idea of where rights come from.
They don't come from our Bill of Rights or from our government.
And that's why I've always, through this type of influence and common sense, and I would have been on the side that listing rights individually, there was an argument against that, the anti-federalists were arguing against listing them because you wouldn't list enough.
You might miss one and therefore, oh, they were excluded.
So it's the basic principle of life, liberty, and property, and government shouldn't be there.
They're there to protect it.
And now we have categories.
How many times have I complained about group rights?
You don't have a right because you belong to a group.
You neither should be entitled to anything because you belong to a specific lobbying group, nor should you ever be punished.
And over the years, we have punished groups, you know, whether it has been the blacks in slavery and Jim Crow laws, but also the Japanese.
That was a group of people that were punished.
So this is why rights have to be individual.
And this is why we could have solved the problems of marriage and everything else.
Everybody has an individual right to their life and liberty, but they can't do anything.
They cannot use force, nor should the government be able to use force.
But I want to thank everybody for tuning in and suggest that if you have not, I'm sure a lot of you have already read the book, The Law.
And if you have, think about passing it out and spreading around 75 pages.
It's interesting that the Fee Foundation published this book in 1950.
It was 100 years after Vastiat died.
And it's still circulating, but it's easy to get.
You can read this off the internet, and there are no restraints on publishing this.
This is very, a very important little book, especially to get people introduced to the basic moral principle.
And I think this is one of the reasons a lot of young people are attracted to the philosophy of libertarianism.
It's based on a moral principle of nonviolence.
And why people followed Gandhi and why people followed Martin Luther King, they had a moral principle that they were defending.
And there's a very important basic moral principle here to deal with social behavior as well as behavior in the economic and marketplace as well as in foreign policy.