What will the workers become once you won’t have any bread to give them and that private industry will be dead?

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 246 to 248 (in French)
Jacques Bonhomme, June 20th, 1848

On the eve of the dissolution of the National Workshops (literally! the dissolution occurred on June 21st), Frédéric Bastiat enjoined the government (Ledru-Rollin was then Interior Minister) and the parliament (Lamartine was then a member of parliament) to dissolve the National Workshops. It was possibly the most communist policy ever implemented in France, the failure of which was notorious and quick (three months).

In this article, Frédéric Bastiat establishes a long list of reasons for which the National Workshops need to be dissolved and the fatal political reasons there might be to keep them (he does not believe himself in the hypothetical accusations he is making). As a conclusion, today’s quote presents the consequence there would be if they were kept, which reminds us of the famous quote by Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.

What economics teach us is that wealth is made of consumed production, which requires it to be produced in the first place. The communist experiences have confirmed that they constitue a sub-optimal organisation of production.