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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 279 of Liberty Fund’s newly published, expanded English-language edition, expertly edited by David Hart, of Frédéric Bastiat’s great work Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”; specifically, this passage is from the new translation of Bastiat’s May 1847 essay “On Moderation” (“De la moderation”); Bastiat here responds to those who advise him and other free traders to soften – to moderate – their case for free trade in order to improve free-trade’s immediate political prospects:

Those who give us this advice are forgetting one thing, which is that we do not aspire so much to overturn the protective regime as to enlighten the general public about this regime, or rather, although the first of these tasks is the aim, the second appears to us to be the essential means.

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