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04 - The Law - Frederic Bastiat · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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  Section four. With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin,
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  and the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the general
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  good by general plunder. The socialists say, since the law organizes justice,
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  why should it not organize labor, instruction and religion. Why because it could
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  not organize labor, instruction and religion without disorganizing justice. For remember that law
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  is force, and that consequently, the domain of the law cannot properly extend
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  beyond the domain of force. When law and force keep a man within the
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  bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They
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  only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality,
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  his liberty, nor his property. Regard the personality, the liberty, the
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  property of others, they hold themselves to be on the defensive. They defend
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  the equal right of all. They fulfill the mission whose harmlessness is evident,
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  whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed. This
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  is so true that, as a friend of mine once remarked to me,
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  to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign is
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  to use an expression that is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said
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  the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact,
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  it is not justice that has an existence of its own. It is injustice
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  the one results from the absence of the other. But when the law,
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  through the medium of its necessary agent, force, imposes a form of labor,
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  a method or subject of instruction, a creed, or a worship,
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  it is no longer negative. It acts positively upon men. It substitutes the
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  will of this legislature for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for
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  their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, or
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  to foresee. The law does all that for them. The intellect is for
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  them a useless encumbrance. They cease to be men. They lose their personality,
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  their liberty, and their property. Try to imagine a form of labor
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  imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty, A transmission of will
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  imposed by force, it is not a violation of property. If you cannot
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  succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize
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  labor and industry without organizing injustice. When from the seclusion of his office.
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  A politician takes the view of society. He has struck with the spectacle of
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  inequality that presents itself. He mourns over the sufferings that are the lot of
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  so many of our brethren, sufferings whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by
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  the contrast of luxury and wealth. He ought, perhaps to ask himself whether
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  such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times,
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  exercise in the way of conquests, and by plunder of more recent times effected
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  through the medium of the laws. He ought to ask himself whether, granting
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  the aspiration of all men to well being in improvement, the reign of justice
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  would not suffice to realize the greatest activity of progress and the greatest amount of
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  equality compatible with the individual responsibility that God has awarded as a just retribution of
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  virtue and vice. He never gives gives this a thought. His mind turns
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  toward combinations, arrangements, legal or factitious organizations. He seeks the remedy in
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  perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil. For justice apart which we have
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  seen, is only a negation. Is there any one of these legal arrangements
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  that does not contain the principle of plunder. You say, there are men
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  who have no money, and you apply the law. But the law is
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  not a self supplied fountain. Whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of its
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  society. Nothing can enter the public treasury in favor of one citizen or one
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  class. But what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to
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  it? If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed
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  to it. Your law, it is true, is no plunderer. But
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  but it does nothing for men who want money. It does not promote equality.
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  It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from
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  one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder.
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  Examine in this light the protection of tariffs, subsidies, right to profit,
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  right to labor, right to assistance, free public education, progressive taxation,
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  gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will always find at the
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  bottom legal plunder organized injustice. You say, there are men who want knowledge,
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  and you apply to the law. But the law is not a torch
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  that sheds light, that originates within itself. It extends over a society where
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  there are men who have knowledge and others who have not, citizens who want
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  to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do
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  one of two things. Either allow a free operation to this kind of transaction,
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  that is, let this kind of want satisfy itself freely, or else
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  preempt the will of the people in the matter and take from some of them
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  sufficient to pay professors commission to instruct others for free. But in this second
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  case there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property legal plunder.
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  You say, here are men who are wanting in immorality or religion, and
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  you apply to the law. But the law is force, and need I
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  say how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these
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  matters As a result of its systems, of its efforts, it would seem
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  that socialism, notwithstanding all its self complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster
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  of legal plunder. But what does it do. It disguises it cleverly from
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  others and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity,
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  organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands
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  of the law, because we only ask it for justice. It alleges that
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  we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association, and they brand us
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  with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is
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  not natural organization but forced organization. It is not free association, but the
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  forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity,
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  but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity,
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  which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy
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  from which it emanates, confounds government and society, and so every time we
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  object to a thing being done by government, it concludes that we object to
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  its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state, then
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  we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion, then we
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  would have no religion at all. We object to any equality which is brought
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  about by the state, then we are against equality, et cetera, et
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  cetera. They may as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat because
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  we object to the cultivation of corn by the state. How is it that
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  the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain, prosperity
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  and a positive sense wealth. Science religion should ever have gained ground in the
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  political world. The modern politicians, particularly those of the socialist school, found
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  their different theories upon one common hypothesis, and surely a more strange and more
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  presumptuous notion could never have entered a human brain. They divide mankind into two
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  parts. Men in general, except one form the first. The politician himself
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  forms the second, which is by far the most important. In fact,
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  they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action and of
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  any means of discernment in themselves, that they have no initiative, that they
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  are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse, at best, a
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  vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence, susceptible of assuming from an exterior
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  will and hand an infinite number of forms, more or less symmetric, artistic,
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  and perfected. Moreover, one of these politicians does not hesitate to assume
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  that he himself is under the names of organizer, discoverer, legislator, institutor,
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  or founder, this will and hand, this universal initiative, this creative
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  power, whose sublime mission, it is to gather together the scattered materials,
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  that is, men, into society. Starting from these data, as a
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  gardener, according to his caprice, shapes his tree into pyramids, parasols,
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  cubes, cones, vases, espalliers, distefs, or fans. So the
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  socialists, following his camera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles,
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  sub circles, honeycombs, or social workshops, with all kinds of variations.
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  And as the gardener to bring his trees into shape needs hatchets, pruning
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  hooks, saws, and shears, so the politician to bring society into shape
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  needs the forces which he can only find in the laws, the law of
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  tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, and the law
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  of education. It is so true that the socialists look upon mankind as a
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  subject for social experiments, that if by chance they are not quite certain of
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  the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind as a
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  subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the idea of trying
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  all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand
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  of the Constituent Assembly a perish with all its inhabitants upon which to make his
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  experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he
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  makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the
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  agricol culturist some seed, and a corner of his field to make trial of
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  an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees,
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  between the inventor and his machines, between the chemists and his substances, between
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  the agriculturists and his seed. The socialist things in all sincerity that there is
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  the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth
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  century look upon society as an artificial production of the legislator's genius. This idea,
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  the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers
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  and great writers of our country. To all these persons, these relations between
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  mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the
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  clay and the potter. Moreover, if they have consented to recognize in the
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  heart heart of man a capability of action, and in his intellect a faculty
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  of discernment, they have looked upon this gift of God as a fatal one,
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  and thought that mankind under these two impulses tended fatally toward ruin. They
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  have taken it for granted that if abandoned to their own inclinations, men would
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  only occupy themselves with religion to arrive at atheism, with instruction to come to
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  ignorance, and with labor and exchange, to be extinguished in misery. End
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  of Section four.