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00 Foreward - The Law - Frederic Bastiat · The Philosophy Insights Collection

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  Forward. Anyone building a personal library of liberty must include in it a copy
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  of Frederick Bastiat's classic essay The Law, first published in eighteen fifty by the
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  great French economist and journalist. It is as clear a statement as has ever
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  been made of the original American ideal of government, as proclaimed in the Declaration
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  of Independence, that the main purpose of any government is the protection of the
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  lives, liberties, and property of its citizens. Bastiat believed that all human
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  beings possessed the God given natural rights of individuality, liberty, property. This
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  is man. He wrote, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation.
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  But even in his time, writing in the late eighteen forties, Bastiat
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  was alarmed over how the law had been perverted into an instrument of what he
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  called legal plunder. Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly used
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  to deprive one group of cities of those rights for the benefit of another group,
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  and especially for the benefit of the state itself. He condemned the legal
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  plunder of protectionist tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public
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  schools, government jobs programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury laws,
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  and more. Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant
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  today as they were the day he first issued them. The system of legal
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  plunder, which many now celebrate as democracy, will erase from everyone's conscience,
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  he wrote, the distinction between justice and injustice. The plundered classes will eventually
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  figure out how to enter the political game and plunder their fellow man. Legislation
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  will never be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political
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  force. The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of education by
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  the state. Those who held government endowed teaching positions, he wrote, would
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  rarely criticize legal plunder lest their government endowments be ended. The system of legal
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  plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance of politics and society. That would be
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  a most unhealthy development, as it would encourage even more citizens to seek to
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  improve their own well being, not by producing goods and services for the market
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  place, but by plundering their fellow citizens through politics. Bastiat was also wise
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  enough to anticipate what modern economists call rent seeking and rent avoidance behavior. These
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  two clumsy phrases refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors
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  legal plunder, and of engaging in political activity directed at protecting one's self from
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  being the victim of plunder seekers. For example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies
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  for high tariffs on steel, whereas steel using industries like the automobile industry can
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  be expected to lobby against high tariffs on steel. The reason why modern economists
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  are concerned about rent seeking is the opportunity cost involved. The more time,
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  effort, and money that is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics merely
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  transferring wealth, the less time is spent on producing goods and services, which
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  increases wealth. Thus, legal plunder impoverishes the entire society, despite the fact
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  that a small but politically influential part of the society benefits from it. It
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  is remarkable, in reading the Law how perfectly accurate Bastiat was in describing the
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  statists of his day, which it turns out were not much different from the
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  statists of today or of any other day. The French socialists of Bastiat's day
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  espoused doctrines that perverted charity, education, and morals. For one thing,
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  true charity does not begin with the robbery of taxation. He pointed out,
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  government schooling is inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education, and
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  it is hardly moral for a large gang government too legally rob one section of
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  the population, keep most of the loot and share a little of it with
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  various needy individuals. Socialists want to play god, Bastiat observed, anticipating all
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  the future tyrants and despots of the world who would try to remake the world
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  in their image, whether that image would be communism, fascism, the Glorious
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  Union, or global democracy. Bastiat also observed that socialists wanted forced conformity,
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  rigid regimentation of the population through pervasive regulation, forced equality of wealth, and
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  dictatorship. As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty. Dictatorship need
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  not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed, said Bastiat, was
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  the laws enacted by a congress or a parliament that would achieve the same effect
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  forced conformity. Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world had far
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  too many great men, fathers of their countries, et cetera, who in
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  reality are usually nothing but petty tyrants. With a sick and compulsive desire to
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  rule over others. The defenders of the free society should have a healthy disrespect
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  for all such men. Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of eighteen
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  fifty as being as close as any society in the world to his ideal of
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  a government that protected individual rights to life, liberty, and property. There
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  were two major exceptions, however, the twin evils of slavery and protectionist tariffs.
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  Frederic Bastiat died on Christmas Eve eighteen fifty and did not live to observe
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  the convulsions that the America he admired so much would go through in the next
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  fifteen years and longer. It is unlikely that he would have considered the U.
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  S government's military invasion of the Southern State Rates in eighteen sixty one,
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  the killing of some three hundred thousand citizens, and the bombing, burning,
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  and plundering of the region's cities, towns, farms, and businesses as being
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  consistent in any way with the protection of the lives, liberties, and properties
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  of those citizens as promised by the Declaration of Independence. Had he lived to
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  see all of this, he most likely would have added legal murder to legal
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  plunder as one of the two great sins of government. He would likely have
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  viewed the post war Republican Party, with its fifty percent average tariff rates,
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  its massive corporate welfare schemes, and its twenty five year campaign of genocide against
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  the Plains Indians, as first rate plunderers and traitors to the American ideal.
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  In the latter pages of the Law, Bastiat offers the sage advice that what
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  was really needed was a science of economics that would explain the harmony or lack
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  thereof, of a free society as opposed to socialism. He made a major
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  contribution to this end himself with the publication of his book Economic Harmonies, which
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  can be construed as a precursor to the modern literature of the Austrian school of
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  economics. There is no substitute for a solid understanding of the market order and
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  of the realities of politics when it comes to combating the kinds of destructive socialist
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  schemes that plagued Bastiacht's day as well as ours. Anyone who reads this great
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  essay, along with other free market classics such as Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One
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  Lesson and Murray Rothbard's Power and Market will possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the
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  socialist fantasies of this or any other day. Thomas J. Delrinzo May two
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  thousand seven. Thomas de Lorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland
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  and a member of the Senior Faculty of the Mice's Institute. End of section zero