Added
to this Library with permission from the Foundation
for Economic Education
Foreword
by
Sheldon Richman
The
state is that great fiction by which everyone
tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic
Bastiat
Frederic
Bastiat (1801-1850) holds a special place in the hearts and minds
of the friends of liberty. There is no mystery here to be solved.
The key to Bastiat's appeal is the integrity and elegance of his
message. His writing exhibits a purity and a reasoned passion
that are rare in the modern world. He always wrote to be understood,
to persuade, not to impress or to obfuscate.
Through
the device of the fable, Bastiat deftly shattered the misconceptions
about economics for his French contemporaries. When today, in
modern America, we continue to be told, by intellectuals as well
as by politicians, that the free entry of foreign-made products
impoverishes us or that destructive earthquakes and hurricanes
create prosperity by creating demand for rebuilding, we are seeing
the results of a culture ignorant of Frederic Bastiat.
But
to think of Bastiat as just an economist is to insufficiently
appreciate him. Bastiat was a legal philosopher of the first rank.
What made him so is The Law. Writing as France was being
seduced by the false promises of socialism, Bastiat was concerned
with law in the classical sense; he directs his reason to the
discovery of the principles of social organization best suited
to human beings.
He
begins by recognizing that individuals must act to maintain their
lives. They do so by applying their faculties to the natural world
and transforming its components into useful products. "Life, faculties,
productionin other words, individuality, liberty, propertythis
is man," Bastiat writes. And since they are at the very core of
human nature, they "precede all human legislation, and are superior
to it." Too few people understand that point. Legal positivism,
the notion that there is no right and wrong prior to the enactment
of legislation, sadly afflicts even some advocates of individual
liberty (the utilitarian descendants of Bentham, for example).
But, Bastiat reminds us, "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."
For
Bastiat, law is a negative. He agreed with a friend who
pointed out that it is imprecise to say that law should create
justice. In truth, the law should prevent injustice. "Justice
is achieved only when injustice is absent." That may strike some
readers as dubious. But on reflection, one can see that a free
and just society is what results when forcible intervention against
individuals does not occur; when they are left alone.
The
purpose of law is the defense of life, liberty, and property.
It is, says Bastiat, "the collective organization of the individual
right of lawful defense." Each individual has the right to defend
his life, liberty, and property. A group of individuals, therefore,
may be said to have "collective right" to pool their resources
to defend themselves. "Thus the principle of collective rightits
reason for existing, its lawfulnessis based on individual
right. And this 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." If the very purpose of
law is the protection of individual rights, then law may not be
usedwithout contradictionto accomplish what individuals
have no right to do. "Such a perversion of force would be... contrary
to our premise." The result would be unlawful law.
A
society based on a proper conception of law would be orderly and
prosperous. But unfortunately, some will choose plunder over production
if the former requires less effort than the latter. A grave danger
arises when the class of people who make the law (legislation)
turns to plunder. The result, Bastiat writes, is "lawful plunder."
At first, only the small group of lawmakers practices legal plunder.
But that may set in motion a process in which the plundered classes,
rather than seeking to abolish the perversion of law, instead
strive to get in on it. "It is as if it were necessary, before
a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retributionsome
for their evilness, and some for their lack of understanding."
The
result of generalized legal plunder is moral chaos precisely because
law and morality have been set at odds. "When law and morality
contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of
either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law."
Bastiat points out that for many people, what is legal is legitimate.
So they are plunged into confusion. And conflict.
As long as
it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose-that
it may violate property instead of protecting it-then everyone
will want to participate in making the law, either to protect
himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions
will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There
will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the
struggle within will be no less furious.
Sound
familiar?
Bastiat
finds another motivebesides the desire for bootybehind
legal plunder: "false philanthropy." Again, he sees a contradiction.
If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice.
The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its
owner. He applies that analysis to all forms of government intervention,
from tariffs to so-called public education.
Bastiat's
words are as fresh as if they were written today. He explains
that one can identify legal plunder by looking for laws that authorize
that one person's property be given to someone else. Such laws
should be abolished "without delay." But, he warns, "the person
who profits from such law will complain bitterly, defending his
acquired rights," his entitlements. Bastiat's advice is
direct: "Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests.
The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into
a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day
delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone
else."
The
world view that underlies the distortion of law, Bastiat writes,
holds man as a passive entity, lacking a motor of his own and
awaiting the hand and plan of the wise legislator. He quotes Rousseau:
"The legislator is the mechanic who invents the machine." Saint-Just:
"The legislator commands the future. It is for him to will
the good of mankind. It is for him to make men what he wills
them to be." And the razor-sharp Robespierre: "The function of
government is to direct the physical and morale powers of the
nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into
being."
Bastiat
echoes Adam Smith's condemnation of the "man of system," who sees
people as mere pieces to be moved about a chessboard. To accomplish
his objectives, the legislator must stamp out human differences,
for they impede the plan. Forced conformity (is there any other
kind?) is the order of the day. Bastiat quotes several writers
in this vein, then replies:
Oh, sublime
writers! Please remember sometimes that this clay, this sand,
and this manure which you so arbitrarily dispose of, are men!
They are your equals! They are intelligent and free human beings
like yourselves! As you have, they too have received from God
the faculty to observe, to plan ahead, to think, and to judge
for themselves!
After quoting several of those
writers who are so willing to devote themselves to reinventing
people, Bastiat can no longer control his outrage: "Ah, you miserable
creatures! You think you are so great! You who judge humanity
to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you
reform yourselves? That would be sufficient enough."
Nor does Bastiat allow unrestrained
democracy to escape his grasp. With his usual elegance, he goes
right to the core of the issue. The democrat hails the people's
wisdom. In what does that wisdom consist? The ability to pick
all-powerful legislatorsand that is all. "The people who,
during the election, were so wise, so moral, so perfect, now have
no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies
that lead downward to degradation .... If people are as incapable,
as immoral, and as ignorant as the politicians indicate, then
why is the right of these same people to vote defended with such
passionate insistence?" And "if the natural tendencies of mankind
are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how
is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good?"
Bastiat closes his volume with
a clarion call for freedom and a rejection of all proposals to
impose unnatural social arrangements on people. He implores all
"legislators and do-gooders [to] reject all systems, and try liberty."
In the years since The Law
was first published, little has been written in the classical
liberal tradition that can approach its purity, its power, its
nearly poetic quality. Alas, the world is far from having learned
the lessons of The Law. Bastiat would be saddened by what
America has become. He warned us. He identified the principles
indispensable for proper human society and made them accessible
to all. In the struggle to end the legalized plunder of statism
and to defend individual liberty, how much more could be asked
of one man?
November 1995
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