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Anyone building a personal library of liberty must include in it a copy
of Frédéric Bastiat's classic essay, "The Law." First published in 1850
by the great French economist and journalist, it is as clear a statement
as has ever been made of the original American ideal of government, as
proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that the main purpose of
any government is the protection of the lives, liberties, and property
of its citizens.
Bastiat believed that all human beings possessed the God-given, natural
rights of "individuality, liberty, property." "This is man," he wrote.
These "three gifts from God precede all human legislation." But even in
his time--writing in the late 1840s--Bastiat was alarmed over how the
law had been "perverted" into an instrument of what he called legal
plunder. Far from protecting individual rights, the law was increasingly
used to deprive one group of citizens of those rights for the benefit
of another group, and especially for the benefit of the state itself. He
condemned the legal plunder of protectionist
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tariffs, government subsidies of all kinds, progressive taxation, public
schools, government "jobs" programs, minimum wage laws, welfare, usury
laws, and more.
Bastiat's warnings of the dire effects of legal plunder are as relevant
today as they were the day he first issued them. The system of legal
plunder (which many now celebrate as "democracy") will erase from
everyone's conscience, he wrote, the distinction between justice and
injustice. The plundered classes will eventually figure out how to enter
the political game and plunder their fellow man. Legislation will never
be guided by any principles of justice, but only by brute political
force.
The great French champion of liberty also forecast the corruption of
education by the state. Those who held "government-endowed teaching
positions," he wrote, would rarely criticize legal plunder lest their
government endowments be ended.
The system of legal plunder would also greatly exaggerate the importance
of politics in society. That would be a most unhealthy development as
it would encourage even more citizens to seek to improve their own
well-being not by producing goods and services for the marketplace but
by plundering their fellow citizens through politics.
Bastiat was also wise enough to anticipate what modern economists call
"rent seeking" and "rent avoidance" behavior. These two clumsy phrases
refer, respectively, to the phenomena of lobbying for political favors
(legal plunder), and of engaging in political activity directed at
protecting oneself from being the victim of plunder seekers. (For
example, the steel manufacturing industry lobbies for high tariffs on
steel, whereas steel-using industries, like the automobile industry, can
be expected to lobby against high tariffs on steel).
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The reason why modem economists are concerned about "rent seeking" is
the opportunity cost involved: the more time, effort and money that
is spent by businesses on conniving to manipulate politics--merely
transferring wealth--the less time is spent on producing goods and
services, which increases wealth. Thus, legal plunder impoverishes
the entire society despite the fact that a small (but politically
influential) part of the society benefits from it.
It is remarkable, in reading "The Law," how perfectly accurate Bastiat
was in describing the statists of his day which, it turns out, were not
much different from the statists of today or any other 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 the robbery of taxation, he pointed out. Government schooling is
inevitably an exercise in statist brainwashing, not genuine education;
and it is hardly "moral" for a large gang (government) to (legally) rob
one segment of the population, keep most of the loot, and share a little
of it with various "needy" individuals.
Socialists want "to play God," Bastiat observed, anticipating all the
future tyrants and despots of the world who would try to remake the
world in their image, whether that image would be communism, fascism,
the "glorious union," or "global democracy." Bastiat also observed
that socialists wanted forced conformity; rigid regimentation of the
population through pervasive regulation; forced equality of wealth; and
dictatorship. As such, they were the mortal enemies of liberty.
"Dictatorship" need not involve an actual dictator. All that was needed,
said Bastiat, was "the laws," enacted
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by a Congress or a Parliament, that would achieve the same effect:
forced conformity.
Bastiat was also wise to point out that the world has far too many
"great men," "fathers of their countries," etc., who in reality are
usually nothing but petty tyrants with a sick and compulsive desire
to rule over others. The defenders of the free society should have a
healthy disrespect for all such men.
Bastiat admired America and pointed to the America of 1850 as being
as close as any society in the world to his ideal of a government that
protected individual rights to life, liberty, and property. There
were two major exeptions, however: the twin evils of slavery and
protectionist tariffs.
Frédéric Bastiat died on Christmas Eve, 1850, and did not live to
observe the convulsions that the America he admired so much would go
through in the next fifteen years (and longer). It is unlikely that he
would have considered the U.S. government's military invasion of the
Southern states in 1861, the killing of some 300,000 citizens, and the
bombing, burning, and plundering of the region's cities, towns, farms,
and businesses as being consistent in any way with the protection of
the lives, liberties and properties of those citizens as promised by the
Declaration of Independence. Had he lived to see all of this, he most
likely would have added "legal murder" to "legal plunder" as one of the
two great sins of government. He would likely have viewed the post-war
Republican Party, with its 50 percent average tariff rates, its massive
corporate welfare schemes, and its 25-year campaign of genocide against
the Plains Indians as first-rate plunderers and 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
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economics" that would explain the harmony (or lack thereof) of a free
society (as opposed to socialism). He made a major contribution to this
end himself with the publication of his book, _Economic Harmonies_,
which can be construed as a precursor to the modern literature of
the Austrian School of economics. There is no substitute for a solid
understanding of the market order (and of the realities of politics)
when it comes to combating the kinds of destructive socialistic schemes
that plagued Bastiat's day as well as ours. Anyone who reads this great
essay along with other free-market classics, such as Henry Hazlitt's
Economics in One Lesson and Murray Roth-bard's Power and Market, will
possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist fantasies
of this or any other day.