Frédéric Bastiat is a recurring reference on The Bob Zadek Show, invoked by host Bob Zadek and by guests as an authority on unintended consequences and the limits of state action. The excerpts do not present a biography of Bastiat; they present his use. Zadek introduces him as a French philosopher who lived roughly from 1801 to 1850 or 1851 and who wrote The Law, a book Zadek calls easy to read and commends to listeners Cash For Clunkers is a Dud (2009). Guests describe reading him at different stages of life and drawing from him a laissez-faire position and a vocabulary for describing what government action hides.
Introduction on the show
Bastiat enters the program through Zadek’s own account of preparing for episodes. In the 2009 episode on Cash for Clunkers, Zadek says that in studying libertarian literature he encountered “Frédéric Bastiat, who I’ve referred to before on this show,” one of the philosophers he had never heard about before beginning work on the program Cash For Clunkers is a Dud (2009). He dates Bastiat to roughly 1801 to 1850 or 1851, notes that Bastiat would not have called himself a libertarian, and recommends The Law to listeners. He then quotes Bastiat: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” Zadek applies the line to the Obama administration and to the Cash for Clunkers program that is the episode’s topic, with Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason magazine as guest.
The same episode frames the discussion through Bastiat’s “Broken Window Fallacy,” which the episode’s summary describes as the lens for critiquing the program’s effects on used car markets, charities, and the national debt Cash For Clunkers is a Dud (2009). The excerpts do not reproduce the fallacy’s mechanics in that episode; they name it and attach it to the policy under discussion.
The unseen
The most developed use of Bastiat in the excerpts comes in the 2022 episode with Mike Munger on the Constitution. Zadek asks how economic advice would have changed government decisions made in the name of following the science, and Munger answers that every decision is about trade-offs and opportunity cost, that David Hume warned against science making assertions as if it were a religion, and that what is missing is evidence about what is given up Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022). Zadek responds by saying Munger is channeling Bastiat, “who reminded us almost 200 years ago that one must pay attention to his phrase ‘the unseen.’” Zadek states that there are unseen and invisible but real and important consequences of any decision, and that one makes decisions in utter ignorance if one does not focus on them. He adds that ignoring the unseen is advantageous to a decision-maker because it is hard to attack a decision by referring to things that did not happen.
Munger agrees and says he is worried that people constantly have to be reminded of this. He cites the Chicago Teachers Union vote for remote learning and its effects on families who depend on schools for reliable, safe childcare and for education, arguing that it will take years to measure the unseen losses. He concludes that Bastiat came up with a pithy phrase to describe a general problem and that “we have learned nothing,” noting the phrase was written in 1850 Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022).
The great unseen
Bastiat’s phrase “the great unseen” is applied to incarcerated people in the 2019 episode with Rachel Barkow on criminal justice. Barkow argues that political dysfunction drives incarceration: politicians find it soundbite-friendly to promise tougher sentences, that people are not deterred by an increase in a sentence from five years to seven years, and that what matters for deterrence is whether people are going to get caught, not sentence length Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019). She notes that of 2.2 million incarcerated people, almost 500,000 are detained pre-trial without having been convicted of anything, and that prosecutors ask for detention because they do not want to look like they are cutting somebody a break.
Zadek responds that politicians run on being tough on crime and increasing sentencing, and imagines the platform rephrased as taking away more people’s liberty and locking up more people in cages than an opponent would. He says prisoners do not have a strong voting lobby and few people leap to their defense, and that they are, in Bastiat’s words, the “great unseen” — locked away where nobody can see them, so that they are not in our sight and therefore not in our consciousness Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019). The excerpt breaks off mid-sentence after “So the politics.”
Influence on a founder
In the 2021 episode with Vít Jedlička on founding the Free Republic of Liberland, Bastiat appears as a formative influence rather than a citation. Jedlička says he studied Bastiat when he was 13, came across his books by coincidence, and became a keen supporter of laissez-faire from that point on Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021). He recommends The Law, calling it an amazing book that summarizes what is wrong with modern society, and says it is interesting that Bastiat was able to put the problems of modern politics into a book so old. He states that Bastiat is not very well known in France and describes him as the grandfather of the libertarian movement, from whom Mises and Rothbard and other thinkers took their source.
Jedlička summarizes Bastiat’s prescription in his own words: let people be, let the economy be, do not install tariffs, do not tax the people, do not regulate them, because regulations are there mostly for the benefit of a few, usually some monopolies Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021). He describes studying economics at the Economic School of Prague and Charles University, studying at the CEVRO Institute, starting a think tank called Reformy.cz, and starting a political party that got one member into the European Parliament, before concluding that it might be easier to start a new country than to fix the system from within. The excerpt ends with Zadek beginning a question.
Across episodes
The excerpts show Bastiat invoked in four episodes across three years, with the treatment shifting by context rather than developing as an argument. In 2009 Zadek introduces him biographically and quotes his line about the state, applying it to Cash for Clunkers Cash For Clunkers is a Dud (2009). In 2019 Zadek applies the phrase “the great unseen” to prisoners, with Barkow supplying the political-dysfunction account Rachel Barkow on Fixing the Fundamentals of Criminal Justice (2019). In 2021 Jedlička supplies the account of Bastiat as a formative influence and as the grandfather of the libertarian movement Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021). In 2022 Zadek and Munger develop “the unseen” as a general problem of measuring what did not happen, with Munger adding that the phrase was written in 1850 and that we have learned nothing Troubleshooting the Constitution (2022). The two 2023 episodes with Munger on environmentalism are listed as discussing the Broken Window Fallacy first described by Bastiat, but the excerpts contain no body text from those episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts supply almost no biographical facts about Bastiat beyond Zadek’s approximate dates of 1801 to 1850 or 1851, his French nationality, his authorship of The Law, and his not having used the label libertarian. They do not state where he was born or died, what he did for a living, what political offices he held, or the circumstances in which he wrote. They do not quote the Broken Window Fallacy itself, describe its argument, or give the source in which it appears. The two 2023 episodes on environmentalism are represented only by summaries naming Bastiat and the fallacy, with no speaker text to attribute.