Yes, that's true. If it's so painful and engenders so much debate to make the obvious point that Mao and Bastiat are incompatible, then why add to that pain by trying to make other, more debatable, points.

> I am saying the key idea is harmony from liberty.

I suggest that this is not a good reading of Mao or Bastiat.

For Bastiat, he was not interested in harmony but in wealth generated from private enterprise competing in the market system. For him, private ownership of capital and the right to buy/sell is a subset of "liberty", but that's very different from Mao's use of this term. Moreover Bastiat was not really interested in harmony as someone like Mao would understand it. Bastiat knew, for example, that the laws granting monopolies to everything from the making of buttons to wool to fishing protected people's jobs, and liberalizing these markets would lead to a lot of people being out of work, which would not promote social harmony, but some chaos. What it would do, is allow people to buy suits, candles, fish, for a lower price, thus improving living standards.

One of the things people don't realize is that France was prone to having famines under the medieval guild system. Liberalization of the economy put an end to all the famines. When moderns read these economic debates, they think it is like republicans versus democrats -- but there was real stuff at risk in these debates, like what is the best way to grow enough food? Bastiat insisted that getting rid of all the political stuff and just letting people grow all the food they wanted and sell it to the highest bidder would be the best way to end famines. Mao's approach was the exact opposite. He wanted only political power to decide who could grow food, how much, and who got the food.

Bastiat was targeting all the ridiculous bans that one wasn't allowed to sell a hat unless they were a member of the hat maker's guild -- that was Bastiat's target. Together with all the market bans that one could only sell in this region, and if one wanted to "export" food to a different region of France, there were so many tolls and problems that it became prohibitive. Thus one part of France could be in famine with a surplus of food in another part, and no cost effective way to get food from A to B. This is what Bastiat means by "liberty".

When you read someone like Mao or Bastiat, you have to understand the society they were in and the conversations they were having with others in that society, responding to issues current in their time. You shouldn't lift the disembodied texts, pick up a few sentences, and then start up the spin machine. Really you shouldn't read either of these without spending an appropriate time studying history and especially the intellectual history of the period in which these texts were written.

> For Bastiat, he was not interested in harmony but in wealth generated from private enterprise competing in the market system

You obviously haven’t read his final book.

For that matter, you should read the works of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith’s PhD advisor, chair of moral philosophy. Specifically his emphasis on beauty and harmony. This might give context to why Smith pursued the directions he did: both of Smith’s books were about why people make moral actions.