Foreward - The Law - Frederic Bastiat

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Episode Transcript

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Forward. Any One building a personallibrary of liberty must include in it a
copy of Frederick Bastiat's classic essay TheLaw, first published in eighteen fifty by
the great French economist and journalist.It is as clear a statement as has
ever been made of the original Americanideal of government, as proclaimed in the

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Declaration of Independence, that the mainpurpose of any government is the protection of
the lives, liberties, and propertyof its citizens. Bastiat believed that all
human beings possessed the God given naturalrights of individuality, liberty, property.
This is man. He wrote,these three gifts from God precede all human

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legislation. But even in his time, writing in the late eighteen forties,
Bastiat was alarmed over how the lawhad been perverted into an instrument of what
he called legal plunder. Far fromprotecting individual rights, the law was increasingly
used to deprive one group of cityonsof those rights for the benefit of another

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group, and especially for the benefitof the state itself. He condemned the
legal plunder of protectionist tariffs, governmentsubsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation,
public schools, government jobs programs,minimum wage laws, welfare, usury laws,
and more. Bastiat's warnings of thedire effects of legal plunder are as

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relevant today as they were the dayhe first issued them. The system of
legal plunder, which many now celebrateas democracy, will erase from everyone's conscience,
he wrote, the distinction between justiceand injustice. The plundered classes will
eventually figure out how to enter thepolitical game and plunder their fellow man.

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Legislation will never be guided by anyprinciples of justice, but only by brute
political force. The great French championof liberty also forecast the corruption of education
by the state. Those who heldgovernment endowed teaching positions, he wrote,
would rarely criticize legal plunder lest theirgovernment endowments be ended. The system of

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legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate theimportance of politics and society. That would
be a most unhealthy development, asit would encourage even more citizens to seek
to improve their own well being,not by producing goods and services for the
market place, but by plundering theirfellow citizens through politics. Bastiat was also

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wise enough to anticipate what modern economistscall rent seeking and rent avoidance behavior.
These two clumsy phrases refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political
favors legal plunder, and of engagingin political activity directed at protecting one's self
from being the victim of plunder seekers. For example, the steel manufacturing industry

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lobbies for high tariffs on steel,whereas steel using industries like the automobile industry
can be expected to lobby against hightariffs on steel. The reason why modern
economists are concerned about rent seeking isthe opportunity cost involved. The more time,
effort, and money that is spentby businesses on conniving to manipulate politics

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merely transferring wealth, the less timeis spent on producing goods and services,
which increases wealth. Thus, legalplunder impoverishes the entire society, despite the
fact that a small but politically influentialpart of the society benefits from it.
It is remarkable, in reading theLaw how perfectly accurate Bastiat was in describing

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the statists of his day, whichit turns out were not much different from
the statists of today or of anyother day. The French socialists of Bastiat's
day espoused doctrines that perverted charity,education, and morals. For one thing,
true charity does not begin with therobbery of taxation. He pointed out,

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government schooling is inevitably an exercise instatist brainwashing, not genuine education,
and it is hardly moral for alarge gang government too legally rob one section
of the population, keep most ofthe lute, and share a little of
it with various needy individuals. Socialistswant to play god, Bastiot observed,

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anticipating all the future tyrants and despotsof the world who would try to remake
the world in their image, whetherthat image would be communism, fascism,
the Glorious Union, or global democracy. Bastiat also observed that socialists wanted forced
conformity, rigid regimentation of the populationthrough pervasive regulation, forced equality of wealth,

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and dictatorship. As such, theywere the mortal enemies of liberty.
Dictatorship need not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed, said Bastiot,
was the laws enacted by a congressor a parliament that would achieve the
same effect forced conformity. Bastiat wasalso wise to point out that the world

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had far too many great men,fathers of their countries, et cetera,
who in reality are usually nothing butpetty tyrants. With a sick and compulsive
desire to rule over others. Thedefenders of the free society should have a
healthy disrespect for all such men.Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America

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of eighteen fifty as being as closeas any society in the world to his
ideal of a government that protected individualrights to life, liberty, and property.
There were two major exceptions, however, the twin evils of slavery and
protectionist tariffs. Frederick Bastiat died onChristmas Eve eighteen fifty and did not live

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to observe the convulsions that the Americahe admired so much would go through in
the next fifteen years and longer.It is unlikely that he would have considered
the US government's military invasion of theSouthern States in eighteen sixty one, the
killing of some three hundred thousand citizens, and the bombing, burning, and
plundering of the regions cities, towns, farms, and businesses as being consistent

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in any way with the protection ofthe lives, liberties, and properties of
those citizens as promised by the Declarationof Independence. Had he lived to see
all of this, he most likelywould have added legal murder to legal plunder
as one of the two great sinsof government. He would likely have viewed
the post war Republican Party, withits fifty percent average tariff rates, its

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massive corporate welfare schemes, and itstwenty five year campaign of genocide against the
Plains Indians, as first rate plunderersand traitors to the American ideal. In
the latter pages of the Law,Bastiat offers the sage advice that what was
really needed was a science of economicsthat would explain the harmony or lack thereof,

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of a free society as opposed tosocialism. He made a major contribution
to this end himself with the publicationof his book Economic Harmonies, which can
be construed as a precursor to themodern literature of the Austrian school of economics.
There is no substitute for a solidunderstanding of the market order and of

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the realities of politics when it comesto combating the kinds of destructive socialist schemes
that plagued Bastiat's day as well asours. Anyone who reads this great essay,
along with other free market classics suchas Henry Hazlitt's economics in one lesson
and Murray Rothbard's Power and Market willpossess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist

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fantasies of this or any other day. Thomas J. De Lorenzo May two
thousand and seven. Thomas de Lorenzois professor of economics at Loyola College in
Maryland and a member of the SeniorFaculty of the Mice's Institute. End of section zero