Notes from Frederick Bastiat’s Essays on Political Economy Read online

is made to do a little good now, at the expense of a great deal of harm in future. But such proceedings call forth the specter of bankruptcy, which puts an end to credit. What is to be done then? Why, then, the new Government takes a bold step; it unites all its forces in order to maintain itself; it smothers opinion, has recourse to arbitrary measures, ridicules its former maxims, declares that it is impossible to conduct the administration except at the risk of being unpopular; in short, it proclaims itself governmental.” How prophetic were Bastiat’s words…. Is this not exactly what we see today?

  Why Laws?

  Most of us take laws, and the need for laws, for granted. But Bastiat explains them in a new way: “It is not because men have made laws, that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand, that men make laws. Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life; elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and cannot be understood without them.”

  “… Now, labor being in itself a pain, and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows, and history proves it, that wherever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails; and neither religion nor morality can, in this case, prevent it from prevailing. When does plunder cease, then? When it becomes less burdensome and more dangerous than labor. It is very evident that the proper aim of law is to oppose the powerful obstacle of collective force to this fatal tendency; that all its measures should be in favor of property, and against plunder.… It would be impossible, therefore, to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this--the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” As Bastiat has explained so well, Governments should exist to protect us from plunder, not to legalize plunder!

  “…No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose.”

  “… Look at the United States. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain--which is, to secure to everyone his liberty and his property.” If this could be said of us in 1850, can it still be said of us in 2013? “Therefore, there is no country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a more solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two questions, and only two, which from the beginning have endangered political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and that of tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which, contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person…” So, prior to the Civil War, Bastiat saw our biggest problems in the U.S. as slavery and tariffs. Slavery is no longer legal, but what has replaced it? With taxes ever on the rise, aren’t we becoming slaves to the government now instead?

  Legal Plunder is Still Plunder

  “… It is absolutely necessary that this question of legal plunder should be determined, and there are only three solutions of it:-- 1. When the few plunder the many. 2. When everybody plunders everybody else. 3. When nobody plunders anybody. Partial plunder, universal plunder, absence of plunder, amongst these we have to make our choice.” Again, the simplicity with which he narrows down our choices – no plunder, partial plunder or universal plunder – there really are no other options!

  “The law can only produce one of these results. Partial plunder.--This is the system which prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial--a system which is resorted to to avoid the invasion of socialism. Universal plunder.--We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal; the masses having conceived the idea of making law, on the principle of legislators who had preceded them. Absence of plunder.--This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, conciliation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs (which is very inadequate, alas!) till the day of my death.” Might we see the day that enough others today can make the same claim.

  Plunder vs. Property Rights

  “Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder. I do not take it, as it often is taken, in a vague, undefined, relative, or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.” And I could not agree with him more.

  “…When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive; they defend the equal right of all… a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign, is to use an expression which is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said, the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning…It is not justice which has an existence of its own, it is injustice. The one results from the absence of the other.” So, Government should exist to protect us from injustice, but is that the way most people see it today?

  Using the Law

  “… You say, "There are men who have no money," and you apply to the law. But the law is not a self-supplied fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury, in favor of one citizen or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it.” I have complained for some time now that Government has no money of its own to spend; it can only spend what it takes from others. Wouldn’t the understanding of that principle change our perspective on what Government should and shouldn’t do? “If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money--it does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine, in this light, the protection of tariffs, prizes for encouragement, right to profit, right to labour, right to assistance, right to instruction, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will always find at the bottom legal plunder, organized injustice. You say, ‘There are men who want knowledge,’ and you apply to the law. But the law is not a torch which sheds light abroad which is peculiar to itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge, and others who have not; citizens who want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things: either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction, i.e., let this kind of want satisfy itself freely; or else force the will of the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commissioned to instruct others gratuitously. But, in this second case, there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property,--legal plunder.” So, where in this, is the argument for things that now seem to be taken for granted , like “public education”?

  Government vs. Private

  “… Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State--then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion--then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State--then we
are against equality, &c., &c. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.” When I first read this we had just been involved in this argument in one of my classes. Someone had proposed abolishing the Department of Education. Those who were aghast at the idea accused those who favored it of being against education! But that was not their position – they were merely against education being provided by the state (along with food, housing, medical care, and today the list goes on.)

  “How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain--prosperity, in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion--should ever have gained ground in the political world?” There seems to be an even greater push now for Government to grant these things to its citizens.

  “If it is true that a great prince is a rare thing, how much more so must a great lawgiver be?” I have been reading Machiavelli’s The Prince recently and believe it would be safe to say that Machiavelli and Bastiat viewed princes differently! “The former has only to follow the pattern proposed to him by the