Note: We have added final draft versions of material which will appear in the Collected Works , vol. Large armaments necessarily entail heavy taxes : heavy taxes force governments to have recourse to indirect taxation. Indirect taxation cannot possibly be proportionate, and the want of proportion in taxation is a crying injustice inflicted upon the poor to the advantage of the rich.
This question, then, alone remains to be considered : Are not injustice and misery, combined together, an always imminent cause of revolutions? He usually sided with the right on economic issues, and with the left on civil liberties issues. We also have a couple of formal speeches which he gave in the Assembly on cutting the tax on alcohol and the right of workers to form unions.
We do know that he voted to reduce the tax on salt and the mailing of letters, reducing the size of the military, and abolishing conscription. We also have a couple of pamphlets he wrote on matters before the Assembly which he wanted to have circulated in print because he could not make himself heard in the Chamber because of his worsening throat condition. This included pamphlets on reducing the tax on salt Jan.
He briefly returned to radical street journalism while an elected Deputy in June when he, Molinari, and a few other economists created another magazine directed at ordinary people called, Jacques Bonhomme , [57] which appeared for only 4 issues before the rioting and army crackdown of the June Days forced them to close for reasons of safety.
Bastiat also bravely wrote and circulated leaflets calling for the immediate closing down of the National Workshops which were bankrupting the French state. In spite of opposing the demands of the rioters, Bastiat courageously intervened when he saw soldiers firing into the crowds by arranging a cease fire and helping carry the dead and wounded into the side streets where they could be attended to. Bastiat played an important part in the anti-socialist campaign undertaken by Guillaumin and the political economists.
