Bastiat's Birthday at Carpe Diem

The petition is worth reading in its entirety, as should the post from the link below: 

"From a Petition From the French Manufacturers of Candles:
"We (French candlemakers) are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun.  

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat."

~French economist Frédéric Bastiat writing in 1845.  Bastiast was born today in 1801.  "
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/06/french-candlemakers-petition.html