Tweet [1]
… is from page 434 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 collection of Frederic Bastiat [2]’s writings, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics [3] – which is the first volume in what will eventually be six volumes of The Collected Works of Frederic Bastiat [4]; specifically, this quotation is from Bastiat’s 1848 essay “Freedom” (original emphasis):
A people has two ways of procuring something. The first is to make it; the second is to make something else and trade it. It is certainly better to have the option than not to have it. Let us therefore have the freedom to trade.