Bastiat and The Law

I read The Law by Frederick Bastiat after hearing Walter Williams, an economist at George Mason University, quote from it while guest hosting the Limbaugh Program. The thesis of this panthlet sized treatise is that socialism perverts law from its proper purpose of protecting the rights of man to plundering wealth. The Law is well written and easy to comprehend. It is fairly unique in that it attacks socialism from that standpoint that it is a perversion of the law. It traces how laws are used to rob citizens of their rightful income. What I find particularly effective about the book is Bastiat's talent of extrapolating the logical consequences of socialist policies and following them to their absurd conclusions, thus bending them back on themselves.

Below, I have typed out passages that I underlined because I found they succictly illustrated an important point.

On Legal Plunder...

But how is legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it away to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime

The present day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.

I like the phrase that points out that socialism is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else. It illustrates the absurdity of the socialist claim. I like to joke, that here in California where I currently live, that the state is going to tax us into prosperity.

Socialism is legal plunder...

Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon.

The humanitarian in thought is the terrorist in action...

It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted...This is greatly due to a fatal desire - learned from the teachings of antiquity - that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy...

They think only of subjecting mankind to the philanthropic tyranny of their own social inventions. Like Rousseau, they desire to force mankind docilely to bear this yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up in their own imaginations.

This bit makes me think of the Green movement, and how the members of it want to impose on the rest of us a lifestyle and set of ethics they have arbitrarily made up. Cars a bad. Hybrids cars are good. Organic is good. Cheap is bad. Higher priced gasoline is good. Higher priced energy is good. Eating cold food is good because it uses less energy. It goes on and on and on. The commonality of all of this is that it flies in the face of what most human beings want, which is goods that are more affordable that make lives easier and more pleasant.

This next quote may not make a lot of sense taken out of the lead in to it, but it makes sense to me...

The strange phenomenon of our times - one, which will probably astound out descendants - is the doctrine based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator. These three ideas form the sacred symbol of those who proclaim themselves totally democratic.

Here, he is attacking the idea that mankind does not have an inherent nature, that it is like soft clay in the hands of a sculptor. The fact of the matter is that humans do have an inherent nature that cannot be changed. Every individual has his own thoughts, wishes, goals, likes, and dislikes, and we are not particles waiting to be organized by some enlightened ruler. Related to this is that socialists implicitly assume that the government, or those who run it are infallible. Obviously, this is not the case, but socialism does rest on this tenant.