The Law

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
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.