Frederic Bastiat

James Delingpole, who writes good sense week after week in the Spectator, has been awarded the Frederic Bastiat prize for Online Journalism.
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Frederic Bastiat is a 19th century political philosopher who has been called the godfather of Austrian economics and who is in vogue in the United States. Until today, I’d never heard of him, which is rather shocking considering that I spent three years at university studying economics and am an enthusiast for the Austrian school of economics. One explanation for my appalling ignorance is that nearly everything I was taught at university was complete tosh.

My lecturers believed in theories which have now been completely discredited and would have been horrified if they had found their students reading Hayek or Von Mises instead of Marxism Today.
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Frederic Bastiat wrote “Government is the great fiction, through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else”. His best known work “The Law” was written in 1850- and its about time I got onto Amazon to buy it.