The Law

This was written in 1850, just after the 1848 revolution in France. Bastiat was concerned by all the different groups that were trying to use The Law or in Hayeks words, The State to remake society into their vision of a more perfect society. Bastiat argues that trying to use the law to help out one group does so at the expense of another group, he calls this legal plunder and points out how in the long run this will ruin society. Bastiat starts off saying that the basic gifts man has from God are: life, liberty, and property. It is appropriate and correct to defend yourself, your liberty, and your property. The Law was created to ensure that individuals in society were allowed to use these gifts. Bastiat says that unfortunately The Law is abused by the greed and false philanthropy of man. There are two basic ways of getting ahead in life, the first is to work hard and produce, the second is to plunder from others. When trade off and risks for plunder are better than labor, many people will turn to plunder. It is very tempting for those who make laws to use the law to plunder. Bastiat says legal plunder is to use the law to take property, which if was done without the benefit of the law would have been considered a crime. He has some fairly pointed barbs at socialists. He says many of the writers at his time seem to view people as raw material, to be formed or controlled. He says that most socialists see mankind as evil, while they (the socialists) are good. This leads the socialists to feeling justified in using The Law to make mankind be good. Bastiat asks why so many people in government feel that mankind makes too many mistakes, but that they in government are nobler and will make better choices. This is short, and because the original format was a pamphlet, Bastiat acknowledges that it is not complete. So many of his points and arguments are brief. This is a good call to action, to encourage people to be more informed about their government, and to work to limit the government. So much of what Bastiat said long ago is still true.

A great reminder of what is Law and how it works and how it can and is abused. Perfect for the times we are living. I recommend this to anyone who wonders why, the more laws are passed, the more we slip into lawlessness.

Nothing to say, except that these are truths long forgotten.

This is probably the best book out there when it come to the philosophy of individualism and individual liberty. All principles are as true today as when it was written.

Frederic Bastiat was a man of my kidney. This is a clear, simple crie de cour from someone who saw the law perverted to an instrument of plunder to almost everyones injury. He is eloquent in his plea for reform. The evil he wants to eradicate is socialism, and its face is all to familiar to readers 150 years after he wrote this powerful critique. Alas, we never learn.

Prescient book for what happened to the U.S. At the time this book was written, the author considered the U.S. one of the most just nations, but he described perfectly what happens, and did happen, when you have an increase in the size of government, and the power of the legislators to legally plunder the citizens through the laws they enact.

I lack necessary intellectual capacity and courage to judge or review such an amazing narrative and book, however, this book taught me more and more and proofed that some of the critical , social, political and philosophical questions were answered long time ago. This book adds to the answers to my own personal questions such as why Europ for example was able to reform while other nations and ethnicities were unable to do so and describe the kind of debate that was going on some 150 years ago that enabled the modern world make such a giant leap in politics and economics. I would defiantly list this book as one of the best written and recommend it to those interested in the subject of political economics. I have therefore given it 5 stars!

Bastiat crams a lot of wisdom, logic, and common sense into just fifty-five pages. Don’t let this deter you from reading the book but Bastiat is French and died on Christmas Eve, 1850. Yet his words resonate today. He was a great admirer of America because of its freedom and Constitution and the protection of individual liberties. In the foreword to the book written in 2007 by Loyola College economics professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, however, Lorenzo speculates how Bastiat would have reacted to America’s Civil War. “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 lives, liberties, and properties of those citizens as promised by the Declaration of Independence.” Bravo. No political correctness or revisionist history there. DiLorenzo goes on to say, “Anyone who reads this great essay along with other free-market classics, such as Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market, will possess enough intellectual ammunition to debunk the socialist fantasies of this or any other day.” Nuff said. Maybe I will just add a quote directly from Bastiat. “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.”

This work gives a wonderful insight into the differences between negative (natural) rights, which are to be protected by governments, and positive (economic) rights which are supposedly to be provided by governments. It is in the latter category, in the effort to provide justice, that the law is easily corrupted and perverted by violating the negative rights of some to arbitrarily supply positive rights to others. Some of my favorite passages: ...the statement, The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign, is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. [And this quote perfectly expresses why collectivist and socialist governments DO NOT always have the intended charitable results that are promised, but are often best suited to those (rich or poor) willing to game the system:] When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.

What book is is important enough that I read it once a year? The Law by Frederic Bastiat. Written in 1848 as a response to socialism in France, this book essay is just as relevant today as it was then. What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right-from God-to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend - even by force - his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right - its reason for existing, its lawfulness - is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force - for the same reason - cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces? If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. My copy of The Law is filled with highlighted yellow phrases. Among them: But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. How has this perversion of the law been accomplished? And what have been the results? The law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Let us speak of the first. Every legislator should be forced to read Bastiats The Law once a month for their entire term and write a synopsis of how they have upheld the ideas contained within it. The tome should be taught in our school systems. It should be drilled into every citizens head from birth until death. When he was alive, Bastiat called the United States the one nation in the world that came close to applying law in a just manner. If he could visit us today, he would puke all over the steps of Congress. He would barf in the halls of the White House. He would upchuck in lobbyists offices all over Washington, D.C. When he was done throwing up, I do believe Bastiat would start a revolution. He would definitely take on our current system of governance because were turning into Socialism Lite Less Filling, More Taxes. Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations. This is so true that, if by chance, the socialists have any doubts about the success of these combinations, they will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. The popular idea of trying all systems is well known. And one socialist leader has been known seriously to demand that the Constituent Assembly give him a small district with all its inhabitants, to try his experiments upon. In the same manner, an inventor makes a model before he constructs the full-sized machine; the chemist wastes some chemicals - the farmer wastes some seeds and land - to try out an idea. But what a difference there is between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his elements, between the farmer and his seeds! And in all sincerity, the socialist thinks that there is the same difference between him and mankind! It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial creation of the legislators genius. This idea - the fruit of classical education - has taken possession of all the intellectuals and famous writers of our country. To these intellectuals and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter. Moreover, even where they have consented to recognize a principle of action in the heart of man - and a principle of discernment in mans intellect - they have considered these gifts from God to be fatal gifts. They have thought that persons, under the impulse of these two gifts, would fatally tend to ruin themselves. They assume that if the legislators left persons free to follow their own inclinations, they would arrive at atheism instead of religion, ignorance instead of knowledge, poverty instead of production and exchange. Read The Law. It will change all your assumptions about what the role of government should be in your life in only 76 pages. When youre done, make your friends read The Law. If they wont, stop being friends with them. Send a copy to your Representatives and Congressmen and ask them what the hell they think theyre doing with this country of ours.