Douglas Carswell

A lesson about free markets .... from France.

Who is the greatest French man or woman to have ever lived?

Napoleon Bonaparte? I'd argue his involvement in human affairs was largely destructive. Louis Pasteur? He must have saved an awful lot of lives.

Pierre Michaux and Lallement, who helped invent the bicycle? Louis Le Prince, inventor of movie cameras? There are many French inventors, especially from the late nineteenth century, to choose from. Francois Hollande? On April 1st, perhaps.

I reckon that one of the greatest Frenchman of all time is a fellow called Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850). Not heard of him? France, I reckon, would have remained a truly great global player if more people had.

A free market, Classical liberal thinker, Bastiat grasped how wealth is created - and how parasitical elites and vested interests will seek to live off the productivity of others.

Nations rise, he could see, when various naturally parasitical interests were reined in, making production more fruitful than parasitism. Nations sunk into mediocrity, or remained there, when the parasites got their way - and other people's wealth.

Far from being just a creature of his time, Bastiat speaks to us now. His spoof petition of the candle stick makers (they lobbied politicians to block out unfair competition from sunlight) tells us a great deal about the behaviour today of energy renewable interests and central bankers.

As a free market thinker, Bastiat was up there on a par with Adam Smith or Richard Cobden. Yet unlike Smith and Cobden, for all his brilliance, Bastiat had little impact on the French body politic. French lassiez faire gave way to dirigisme. A once global player, presided over by enarques and corporatist interests, France has sunk into Hollandesque mediocrity.

My fear is that free market thinkers on this side of the Channel turn out to be little more than British Bastiats. Already the land of Adam Smith is run by a big, bloated state bureaucracy. The country that produced Cobden trades with the world on the basis of quota, not free competition.

There are of course lots of French people who like Bastiat believe in free markets and enterprise. France's problem is that they all seem to live in west London.

Unless the Conservative party begins to outline a coherent, credible free market alternative, Britain too will descend into corporatist mush and mediocrity. There will be lots of entrepreneurial Brits out there, trading freely with the world. But they will be doing so from Singapore, Sydney and Shanghai.

This article first appeared on the Telegraph site, where Douglas writes regularly. 

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