Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'frederic bastiat'

June 27, 2013

Why Superman is Bad for the Economy

In the new movie Man of Steel, Superman engages in a fight with his fellow aliens from Krypton that causes significant damage to Metropolis. Disaster expert Charles Watson estimates the costs of the physical damage done to the city to be about $2 trillion. Continue Reading...
November 13, 2012

Bastiat on My Mind

One night during either my sophomore or junior year of college, while delaying the doing of homework by walking around the upstairs of Taylor University’s library looking for embarrassing books I could hide in friends’ backpacks so the alarm would go off when we walked out together and they’d have to sheepishly present them at the front desk, I stumbled upon a little treatise called The Law by some French dude named Frederic Bastiat I had never heard of.  Continue Reading...
June 29, 2012

Bastiat’s Vision

This Saturday, June 30, is the 211th birthday of Frédéric Bastiat, one of the greatest political philosophers of the modern era. Considered among the founding fathers of classical liberalism, Bastiat is known for his simple and direct explanations of political and economic realities, his arguments against oppressive economic regulations and his clear and concise vision of a government of limited, enumerated powers, operating under the rule of law and unencumbered by favoritism or distributionist policies. Continue Reading...
June 14, 2011

Global Problems, Global Solutions

There’s a saying that when goods cross borders, armies don’t (it’s the correlative to the observation attributed to Bastiat: “If goods cannot cross borders, armies will.”). The point is that trade tends to bring people together who might otherwise have cause to be hostile. Continue Reading...
March 05, 2008

Solovyov on economic morality

Vladimir Solovyov Towards the end of his life, the 19th century Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov published his “On the Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy” (1897). In this book, wrote historian Paul Valliere, Solovyov abandonded his vision of a “worldwide theocratic order” in favor of the more concrete demands of building a just society. Continue Reading...