Once the State will be the owner of everything, what will matter will be to become the owner of the State.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 20 to 29 (in French)
1845

This unpublished article follows another one that was published in December 1845 pertaining to the same topic and exposing the constructivist approach. Concerning the issue of the weakness of credit granted to agriculture, Frédéric Bastiat shows that government policies in favour of industry (notably through tariffs to help the mining and steel industries) are the culprit against the natural development of agriculture in France. He exposes here the constructivist approach, which consists in trying to organise society tirelessly instead of letting develop the emergent order that will be described by Friedrich Hayek. The consequence is that when a policy is harmful, the “solution” offered is to create a new “corrective” policy instead of repealing the initial one. This is endless and the article shows how, after agriculture, the government is trying to encourage manufactures further. We are living in a world of unicorns where all weaknesses have to be subjected to new policies while ignoring the underlying economic reality.

Today’s quote is a direct criticism of the constructivists whom he accuses of increasing the role of the State to the detriment of liberty, without consistency in political action. The untold objective of the constructivists being to grab power for themselves, the increase of the State power can only be beneficial for the day when they will reach their goal. This bias is painfully clear nowadays when the weight of the State has grown to epic proportions and when politics has become a fight for power by the various constructivist groups trying to prioritise their own whims after distributing the places to their crooks and friends.