![frederic bastiat frederic bastiat](https://www.freedomcircle.com/images/indiv/bastiat-frederic.jpg)
The word he uses with increasing frequency in this period to describe the actions of the State is “la spoliation” (plunder), although he also uses “parasite,” “viol” (rape), “vol” (theft), and “pillage,” which are equally harsh and to the point. What emerges from a chronological examination of his writings is his gradual realization that the State (which he often wrote as THE STATE) is a vast machine that is purposely designed to take the property of some people without their consent and to transfer it to other people. In the six brief years that Bastiat was active as a writer and a politician (1844–1850), he produced six large volumes of letters, pamphlets, articles, and books, which Liberty Fund is translating as part of its Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat (2011–2015). Given the chance, Bastiat might well have fulfilled his great promise as an economic theorist and historian and become the Karl Marx of the nineteenth-century classical-liberal movement. It should be noted that Karl Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus, Das Capital (1867), when he was 49 but lived another 16 years. Had he lived to a ripe old age, instead of dying at the age of 49 from throat cancer, Bastiat might have finished his magnum opus, Economic Harmonies, and completed his history of plunder. Frédéric Bastiat’s unwritten History of Plunder ranks alongside Lord Acton’s History of Liberty and the third volume of Murray Rothbard’s Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought as the greatest libertarian books never written.