No. of Recommendations: 5
I've found it well worth reading Bastiat in the original (his French isn't so very difficult) or in translation -- I've never seen a summary that gets the humor across half so well.
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html a snippet from the Petition of the Candlemakers:
We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation.
[...and thus, if Parliament would only pass a law requiring everyone to block up any opening through which light might enter, it would bigly stimulate all branches of French industry. Make France Great Again!]
Nous subissons l’intolérable concurrence d’un rival étranger placé, à ce qu’il paraît, dans des conditions tellement supérieures aux nôtres, pour la production de la lumière, qu’il en inonde notre marché national à un prix fabuleusement réduit ; car, aussitôt qu’il se montre, notre vente cesse, tous les consommateurs s’adressent à lui, et une branche d’industrie française, dont les ramifications sont innombrables, est tout à coup frappée de la stagnation la plus complète...
