Introduction
Bastiat opens the book with a dedication to the youth of his nation, who are fresh, eager, and unprejudiced in their pursuits. He proposes to put them on the road to a basic truth: that all men's impulses, when motivated by legitimate and well considered self-interest, will produce a harmonious social pattern.
This is particularly important in an age in which well-intentioned men seek to meddle in the affairs of society and presume to have a design that will achieve happiness for all. Such plans often result in the opposite, and when the failings of one grand plan are recognized, disaster follows, followed by another doomed plan. Those in power are certain that they have the right solution, and are oblivious to the fact that their fumbling merely makes matters worse.
Nature itself is resilient. It is not perfect, but seems well provided of mechanisms for self-correction. If we leave things alone, they will mend themselves. If we interfere with nature, we prevent these self-correction mechanisms from functioning, and can turn minor inefficiencies into catastrophes if we attempt to coerce or interfere. Ecosystems are destroyed by the incompetent fumbling of men who mean to help nature do what she can do, and much better, without their assistance.
(EN: He goes on a rather long tare about socialism, communism, and other philosophies of his time. It goes on quite a while, as there were many who desired to invent a method of social engineering around the time that the book was written - and which, but the way, is mere decades before the chaos that occurred in fin-de-siecle France. I'm going to attempt to remove the polemic and stick to the positive statements about economics.)
Economics begins with the premise that each man is perfectly capable of serving his own needs and deciding what's in his own best interests. When it comes to relationships among men, they must be voluntary - that men may choose to work together when they find it beneficial to do so. That is, men collaborate when they gain more from doing so than by going it alone. Mutual benefit is thus the basis of any interaction among men under natural conditions.
Economics is synonymous with liberty, because economics is about making unrestricted and voluntary choices among things. A man chooses to work or to relax based on his own liking, to purchase one thing or another based on his own liking, to do one thing or another based on his own liking. He is compelled to do nothing, and if he makes foolish choices he usually harms no-one but himself - and then learns from his experience to avoid the same mistakes.
Economics is based on practical observation and experimentation rather than theory. The economist observes man such as he is and does not begin with an imaginary ideal to which man must be coerced to conform. Economics may propose or predict what might occur, but does not cling to theories in opposition to reality. It does not petulantly insist that man should be compelled by force to behave any way other than that in which they choose.
Its sole moral obligation is that each man ought to seek to do more good than harm by his actions, and its sole threat is in the prediction of what will naturally occur should a man makes choices that do more harm than good. Nature needs no assistance in punishing the foolish.
He then goes on a bit of a tare about economists who portray man's efforts as a losing battle against fate or nature. Cutting through the polemic again, his main objection is that it is a matter of perspective. Instead of seeing man as being in constant conflict with nature, we could choose to view the situation as man being in constant cooperation with nature - and one in which we are ever improving our conditions. Take for example Malthus's gloomy predictions on the overpopulation of the planet based on the agricultural output of the land. While he was very attentive to the math, he was very inattentive to human ingenuity, and the ability to get more produce out of less land with less labor.
It follows then that the great advances of manufacturing and production are not contrary to nature, but exit within nature and are generally mutually beneficial to man and to his environment. We constantly produce more benefits at less cost. It is only when a species fails to advance that it overwhelms and destroys its habitat. And as such the progress that has taken place is not a sign that mankind is on the journey to disaster, but is constantly improving his condition. If anything, man's ingenuity and inventiveness prevent disaster from occurring.
Another central idea of this work is that economics proposes that there is not a natural conflict among men. In fact, man in his natural state is largely benign to other men. What one man chooses to do seldom affects anyone other than himself. We work together by choice, and only when it is mutually beneficial. So long as a man is free to choose to interact with or avoid his brothers, there is no conflict - it is only when he is forced to enter into relationships to his own detriment that misery results.
Economics is practical, neither philosophical nor political, and the correctness of any theory can easily be tested. But at the same time, economics requires a man to have faith. Faith in his own capabilities, faith in the benign intentions of his fellow man, and faith that given the liberty to act to the best of our abilities, things will turn out for the better.
Man is not a perfect creature. He can err. And because he can err, he will suffer for his errors. This is inevitable, and no one can be constantly successful in protecting a fool from the consequences of his foolishness. We become wise by learning through a process of trial and error and wisdom only comes from the suffering the consequences of our own errors - but we quickly learn to avoid or overcome them. The value in failure is in the lessons it teaches - and in any system that prevents risk for the sake of preventing errors also prevents progress. Failure must be permitted if success is ever to occur.
(EN: He meanders off into the politics of his day again, never to return to the point.)