The Law
by Frederic Bastiat
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Book Summary Information
Author: Frederic BastiatEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-10
ISBN: 1572460733
Number of pages: 79
Publisher: Foundation for Economic Education
Book Reviews of The Law
Book Review: The Law and the Subversion of the Law
Summary: 5 Stars
~The Law: A Classic Blueprint for a Just Society~ is a masterful treatise first published in 1850, which surmises the legitimate ends of the instrumentality of the law, and the subversion of the law. Bastiat is best remembered for his tongue-in-cheek cliché, "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." Frédéric Bastiat opens his landmark treatise on the law with natural law premises acknowledging that life, liberty and property are the gift of God. At the onset, Bastiat rhetorically asks, "What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense." He further notes, "Each of us has a natural right - from God - to defend his person, his liberty, and his property." The instrumentality of the law carries force he admits. "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." He summarily encapsulates the purpose and nature of the law: "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."
Echoing Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, he postulates basic a priori presuppositions about human nature, labor and property. First, man has a rational self-interest. Likewise, human beings are fragile, imperfect and inherently sinful. "The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies," opines Bastiat. He surmises the origins of property and plunder. "Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property." Secondly he notes, "But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder." Plunder often proves more advantageous to men than labor, particularly those without moral scruples. Likewise, Bastiat observes that even the law itself - and its agent of force, the state - may be subverted into an instrument of plunder. He astutely enunciates upon the "legal plunder" phenomenon: "Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another; the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few..." The spoliation of taxpayers for illegitimate ends, such as subsidies, wealth redistribution, government largesse for unneeded bureaucrats, and other socialistic schemes act to subvert the law. How does the law quell injustice, when it simultaneously aids Peter in his efforts to plunder Paul?
Bastiat identifies two forms of legal plunder: "They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer. ¶Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property." Slavery represents the coercive spoliation of labor, by confinement and coercive labor. Protective tariffs represent the spoliation of various sectors of economy to the betterment of a politically-connected constituency. The outrageously exorbitant confiscatory protective tariffs of the nineteenth-century in the United States had an effect of diminishing revenues because of the law of diminishing returns. Protective tariffs depressed agricultural prices and facilitated a massive redistribution of wealth from south to north as most revenues were collected in southern ports and most expenditures were made in the north and the beneficiaries of protection were mostly northerners. Ultimately, the resistance to the legal plunder led to disunion, as onerous taxation at rates in excess of fifty and sixty percent proved detrimental to southern interests. The south shouldered over eighty-percent of the tax burden in the mid-nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the break away Confederacy formed in 1861. The politics of plunder are conducive to war, as plundering parties may wage war to protect their spoliation. Bastiat once remarked, "When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."
Bastiat elaborates movingly upon the proper function of the law in remarkable detail. "When justice is organized by law - that is, by force - this excludes the idea of using law (force) to organize any human activity whatever, whether it be labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, art, or religion. The organizing by law of any one of these would inevitably destroy the essential organization - justice." He critiques the ideas and premises of socialist ideologues who seek to subvert the law for their utopian schemes of transforming humanity or effectuating legal plunder schemes in the name of equality and social justice. He incisively analyzes the desire of socialist lawmakers to manage mankind, pursue redistribution schemes, and play God. He recognizes that socialists fear all liberties. Under socialist logic, voluntary freedom of association (and its attendant freedom to disassociate) is replaced by forced fraternity and corporatist schemes to form cohesive bonds among desperate elements of society with or without their consent. Likewise, the liberty of trade and of labor maybe restrained as well.
Bastiat further criticizes the French Revolution, Napoleon, and various demagogues. In Bastiat's time following the Revolutions of 1848, France was precariously staged to embrace a level of socialism unprecedented of in history. Bastiat saw it as a duty to rise to the occasion as a statesmen and economist, and he sought to diagnose and analyze the socialist fallacies and the logic of legal plunder in his various writings. Likewise, he offered this cogent legal treatise to manifest the true and just purpose of the law. Bastiat has disdain for all artificial systems that seek to subvert the law whether protectionism, mercantilism, socialism or the peculiar French brand of etatism that blended all of these elements.
Today, sadly in the United States of America the law has egregiously been subverted into an instrument of legal plunder. I recommend reading a Cato Institute research paper entitled The Transfer Society by David N. Laband and George C. McClintock which documents the costs of legal plunder in America today. Bastiat remains a staunch defender of the true principles of the law, and his work gives our generation a means of diagnosing the problems of contemporary civil society and effectuating a meaningful restoration of the law to its proper function.
Summary of The Law
Frederic Bastiat's arguments against socialism are as valid today as when first published in 1850. 2 cassettes.Reference Books
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