Revisiting Bastiat’s parable. As president of the most powerful country in the world — and a man with the utmost confidence in his own judgment — would Donald Trump dare to tell the Sun, that fiery ball at the center of our solar system, “You’re fired!” It seems so, if we take him at his recently tweeted word (“Trade wars are good, and easy to win”) and take the liberty of injecting him into the center of the argument found in the “Candle Maker’s Petition,” a satire of protectionist tariffs written by the great French economist, Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850).
