Freeing trade is a question of prosperity, justice, order and peace.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 43 to 46 (in French)
Mémorial bordelais, February 18th, 1846

This article was published in the Mémorial bordelais while the creation of a Free Trade Association modelled on the Anti Corn Law League in England was under way.

Today’s quote introduces the article and sums it up. Frédéric Bastiat explains the four main items that, according to him, follow and justify free trade through:

• favouring prosperity thanks to an optimisation of the division of labour.
• serving the need for justice thanks to a recognition of property rights. If a trade is not free, it means that it is either forced or prohibited, and thus that the buyer or the seller is not free to do whatever he wants with his own property.
• allowing to improve order within the society thanks to the recognition of everyone’s individual responsibility. Governement has no business in deciding for property owners what they can and cannot do with their own property or their labour.

– favouring peace because free trade considerably reduces the sources of conflict between nations (mercantilism and its corollary, which is colonisation, create antagonistic interests between peoples), as we have seen previously with my preferred quote: “If goods and services do not cross borders, soldiers will.”.