A light to live by: Candles or the sun?

Timeless wisdom often comes from stories rather than textbooks. Aesop’s fables, such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, convey moral lessons through allegory. Jesus taught through parables, embedding principles of good behavior in brief narratives like the Good Samaritan to encourage love of neighbor, and the Prodigal Son to inspire forgiveness.

Frédéric Bastiat, a 19^th century French economist and philosopher, applied this tradition to economics. Bastiat used stories to explain opportunity costs, most famously in “The Seen and the Unseen.” His fable about the broken window, for example, shows both the visible short-term and invisible long-term consequences of policy.

One of Bastiat’s best satirical stories is “The Candlemakers’ Petition.” Writing as a candlemaker, he laments the infinite and free supply of light provided by a “foreign manufacturer,” the sun. This candlemaker begs his government to “pass a law ordering the closing of all windows, skylights, shutters, cur­tains, and blinds” in order to save the candle industry. Not only will this save the candlemakers’ jobs, but the candlemaker claims positive effects will trickle down into all branches of the economy, from tallow producers to match sellers. All “will rejoice at their higher wages and increased prosperity.”

Recall Bastiat’s point about the seen and the unseen. Candlemaking and its necessary ingredients would benefit from the candlemaker’s proposal. By eliminating all competition, candles would be the only indoor light source. Metrics like GDP would improve as economic activity grew to meet this need. This is what is seen.

We must also account for the unseen, sometimes literally in the case of the dark homes and gloomy workspaces the candlemaker considers “prosperity.” In a world of shuttered windows, what is left on the table? In other words, what consequences are unseen? This draws a litany of questions: how much precision labor, like smithing and weaving, is lost due to poor lighting? How many researchers and writers switch to jobs not requiring candlelight, and what potential progress is lost? How many dollars are spent on candles that could have contributed to other industries?

The shuttered-window policy creates ripple effects that threaten to undermine the entire economy’s efficiency to support a single interest. It also restricts people’s daily choices and activities while imposing unnecessary costs on their lifestyles. The protectionist policy of eliminating the sun for the candlemakers’ benefit would cause more harm than good.

Candlemakers would be better off heeding Ludwig von Mises, who writes in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition that “Under a system of completely free trade, capital and labor would be employed wherever conditions are most favorable for production.” In a liberal system, the market dictates resource allocation. Where inefficiencies arise, market forces drive equilibrium as new players fill gaps.

In a sunny climate with too many candlemakers, some of them must pivot to other industries. Those who remain will fill a valuable niche or be forced out. Dynamism must be embraced, not discouraged. The American spirit has always been entrepreneurial; producers succeed by providing for consumers, not by limiting their options.

Conversely, we should be wary of policies that seek to benefit a producer or single interest group at consumers’ expense. DC is full of them: social media regulations that favor established companies, tariffs that prop up chosen industries, and energy subsidies that privilege costlier solutions.

Although these policies may have noble intentions, we live in the real world. Policies have invisible consequences. To understand them, we must ask our policymakers similar questions as we did the candlemaker. In the meantime, let’s save candles for night and allow the sun – and the market – to provide efficiency and freedom during the day.