"His answer: the free market. This was a lightbulb moment for Bastiat, a glimpse of the complexity that can develop from a simple starting point. All those fundamental needs supplied, all those goods bought and sold, all those provisions transported at the expense of cash and effort and ingenuity, all those transactions made, and all of it constituting a mechanism that functions so effectively that the good citizens of Paris don't even notice how dependent they are on it—and the whole mechanism created just by allowing people to trade freely with each other. Economists have a shorthand reference to this epiphanic insight into the power of markets: they call it "Who feeds Paris?"
