BASTIAT, Frédéric, & Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

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Gratuité du Crédit. First edition of this collected correspondence debating the legitimacy of interest. Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), whom Schumpeter called "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" (p. 500), was a theorist and advocate of classical liberalism. From 1849 to 1850, the two polemicists clashed in rival journals over the status of interest. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bastiat defends interest as an appropriate payment for the use of capital, while Proudhon castigates it as a means of allowing more wealth to accumulate in the grasping hands of the capitalist.

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