The impression that only government can solve large public challenges, called “public goods” in economics lingo, is one of the reasons people will continue to believe an intrusive government is necessary, until libertarians break down people’s reflexive attitude of yielding to authority, that is. The assumption behind this support is that only government can provide these so-called public goods, which some people believe could not otherwise be provided, and thus society would be worse off if government didn’t forcefully compel financial support.

The problem is that people in government don’t really come up with workable, affordable solutions to things like transportation and security. How could they? To quote Frederic Bastiat, “Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” They have no incentive to solve any problems. Empirically, they have quite the opposite personal incentives, in fact. The government can’t provide lasting solutions because it has no solutions, only force. Force cannot inspire or innovate; it stagnates. When the government steps in to solve a problem, when it applies force, any progress halts and new problems arise. In the late 1800s, the advent of mass government education, teachers wrote with chalk on blackboards in front of classrooms of students who sat in neat little lines. Sound familiar today, one hundred years later? Force is a distraction from real solutions. If the government can’t provide answers to these legitimate questions, then the true purpose in forwarding statism is simply to obscure the question.

By trying to solve the question of public goods with government, greater public goods are created, including the public goods of a well-informed electorate and just laws. Taking the time to become informed on the issues, studying the economic and social impact for each of the differing policies, and investigating candidates’ records, just to know which candidates to support can be very consuming. Yet an individual’s vote makes an insignificant difference in the outcome of the overwhelming majority of races. Cost-benefit wise, it just doesn’t make sense to put that much effort into it. Many times, votes are cast based on some superficial trait or because the candidate confirms a voter’s bias. Even then, voters are inclined to support only someone with a good chance of winning. The second public good of government is the creation of just laws. For argument’s sake, let’s imagine that trustworthy candidates who have the best interest of all their constituents at heart, not just their supporters, are elected. Those lawmakers are beholden to the narrow interest of their distinct constituents. Lobbyists have a much greater incentive to push for special interests that are at the expense of everyone else or future taxpayers. Together, these public goods create a third public good of limiting the power and abuses of government. Of course it would be in everyone’s best interest for government to be restrained to certain powers, but meanwhile private interests are at work to see that government is not limited for long. It becomes socially acceptable to use coercion of government, which subsidizes the use of violence (via legislation and regulation) against competitors.

Maybe business could be convinced that special interests legislation is actually bad for them in the long run. You never know. Maybe voters could be made aware of the benefits of lower taxes and free trade. But the people who have no interest in seeing the government shrink are the government bureaucrats, their families and friends. Including benefits, the average federal worker makes more than twice the compensation as a private-sector employee. They have a big stake in expanding government, all 2.7 million of them.

Some Alternatives

I also think there is a case that so-called public goods would be significantly less important in an stateless society, where I believe workers would have much greater influence over their working conditions and wages than in limited-liability corporations. Different enterprises would have different aims, not only the maximization of its monetary wealth. It would also be true that in a stateless society individuals would become much more wealthy than they are today and would be more inclined to support environmental preservation. Private property rights would also become better defined because government regulation has often been used by well-connected special interests to lobby for protection from liability where common law tort cases were used to recoup damages. In other cases, governments have simply granted license to polluters.

Most everybody likes to hang their hats on national security. To be considered a credible candidate, even “Internet Constitution Jesus” Ron Paul had to say he supported a strong defense. The fact is that the only security people in government provide is for themselves. They’ve got all the big guns, mind you. There was a case just a few weeks ago of a Northwest Airlines crew that lost contact with ground control for over an hour. No military jets were scrabbled to intercept the plane. We’re talking post-9/11. Nothing. They were luck they were not headed toward Washington, D.C., or New York—else they might have been shot out of the air. To some degree, I understand why people in government would react that way. To conquer a nation, you have to control its capitol. That is the seat of the government, where the main bureaucrats operate, and you can bet the tax records are going to be pretty nearby. Because when nations are at war, they are fighting over who controls the tax livestock in the country. That is one of the advantages of a stateless society; there is no central headquarter on which to lay siege, no infrastructure in place to seize property and taxes.

Besides, if we are to believe that we could cultivate this total activist population, which valued liberty vigorously and made personal sacrifices to secure that liberty for its posterity against an entrenched government, then why would they roll over when an organization a fraction of the size of government with no perceived legitimacy tried to usurp those liberties? It seems to me that if there were such an organization that tried to aggress against others, it takes a lot less effort to prevent. You literally wouldn’t have to lift a finger. You just stop doing business with them.

A Faded Hope

What limited-government activists offer is an uninspiring vision for society, a limited slavery, one in which the best they can hope for is a constant struggle to halt the expansion of the state. It should be self-evident why the “eternal vigilance” struggle is a losing battle. A radical limited-government mindset is neither consistent philosophically nor convenient politically. It does not distinguish itself in principle, as it sanctions the use of violence to solve social problems, and is outside the mainstream of political reality. What are its chances of sustaining a groundswell of support if it is fundamentally no different than other political beliefs yet it hampers the political viability of its supporters? I don’t believe the chances are positive.

Bless those in the battle for limited government. I’ll be cheering for them, no doubt. I’ll be with them 90 out of 100 times. But if I got bribed well enough, I might even starting pitching socialized healthcare when in office. Until then, I don’t feel like idolizing a theoretical government that never existed in practice.

The Idea of a Passive Mankind

This fallacious idea of the state as the primary motivator of progress was repeated during his day, Bastiat said. In one Frenchman’s account, “Whatever the issue may be, persons do not decide it for themselves; the prince decides for them. The prince is depicted as the soul of this shapeless mass of people who form the nation. In the prince resides the thought, the foresight, all progress, and the principle of all organization. Thus all responsibility rests with him.”

If this isn’t the common belief today, it surely is close. And that’s the problem. If an individual or organization is responsible for a task, it’s reasonable that the same entity would seek to secure those powers necessary to carry out that task. The problem lies in recognizing an entity’s legitimacy in exercising aggression to accomplish a task, because it then becomes injurious or detrimental for a bystander to not only question the means of fulfilling a task, but the mission itself. That act of questioning the actions and consequences becomes threatening to the entity’s continued legitimacy. The bureaucracy and constituency directly benefiting from those acts are then heeded to mobilize in support. So the state advances, and liberty yields, as Thomas Jefferson noted.

Socialists Ignore Reason and Facts

The same French author that Bastiat quoted from above assigns the credit of Egyptians civility, not to the reason and virtue of the citizens themselves, but to their benevolent leader. “Happy,” said Fenelon, “is the people ruled by a wise king in such a manner.”

Socialists Want to Regiment People

“We are taught to treat persons much as an instructor in agriculture teaches farmers to prepare and tend the soil,” Bastiat said. Well said.

A Famous Name and an Evil Idea

Bastiat quoted theorist Charles Montesquieu as an example of how socialists desire to command and to control:

To maintain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws must favor it. These laws, by proportionately dividing up the fortunes as they are made in commerce, should provide every poor citizen with sufficiently easy circumstances to enable him to work like the others. These same laws should put every rich citizen in such lowered circumstances as to force him to work in order to keep or to gain.

Bastiat then lists Montesquieu’s script to achieve such a society. The first step is to “Establish common ownership of property as in the republic of Plato.”

This is de facto the case today. If property is not already owned by a government authority, then the manner in which that property may be used certainly is subject to thousands of contradictory laws, regulations, and judicial decisions. In the vast majority of cities, a certain portion of a property’s wealth is confiscated on an annual basis.

The second step is to “revere the gods as Plato commanded.” Plato viewed gods as beings with perfect knowledge of justice and goodness, A.K.A the state, which holds the premier sovereign territorial authority. We may not have Zeus any longer. Our gods — democracy, obedience, duty, equality, and in sum, the collective — are in sense more tangible but equally fabricated.
The fourth aspect of forced egalitarianism is to “prevent foreigners from mingling with the people, in order to preserve the customs.” Luckily, the interconnectedness of the Web makes this an impossible task. Nevertheless, immigration laws serve to wedge “illegals” from respectable culture.

Next, “let the state, instead of the citizens, establish commerce.” This is surely true. Legislators govern with whom an individual can trade, by what terms, and even when trade is permissible. The government then commands that it’s own debased currency be accepted as payment. If the federal government can claim authority over a chicken farmer raising grain with water from his own well to feed chickens for his own consumption, the transformation is already complete.

Finally, “legislators should supply arts instead of luxuries; they should satisfy needs instead of desires.” Montesquieu’s meaning of luxuries is anything above the level of subsistence living. His failure is a failure to integrate and differentiate the concepts of individualism and collectivism when encountering the nature of human beings and their needs. Instead of viewing human beings as individuals who are social creatures, the prevalent opinion views society as apart and greater than the actions of individuals.

A Frightful Idea

Bastiat concludes this critique of Montesquieu by damning these popular ideas. “These random selections from the writings of Montesquieu show that he considers persons, liberties, property — mankind itself — to be nothing but materials for legislators to exercise their wisdom upon.”

The next part of the series will continue with “The Leader of the Democrats,” a further critique of Montesquieu view on the supreme authority of government.

The Fate of the Non-Conformists

The non-conformist Bastiat spoke of is the person who would question the morality of these forms of legal plunder. He said, “… it is boldly said that ‘You are a dangerous innovator, a utopian, a theorist, a subversive; you would shatter the foundation upon which society rests.’ ”

If there are laws in force that are anti-liberty, Basiat asked, how can those with ties to the state be expect to speak out against these laws. “Still further,” he added, “morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this [unjust] law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law.”

Who Shall Judge?

Bastiat rarely mentioned any of his intellectual opponents by name, but this is one of those exceptions when he named the followers of the Rousseau school of thought, “who consider themselves far advanced, but whom I consider twenty centuries behind the times.”

The section headways into Bastiat’s section on political privileges. He criticized the phrase “universal suffrage” because even its supporters do not really mean “universal” as in every single person in the country.

For example, there are 36 million people in France. Thus, to make the right of suffrage universal, there should be 36 million voters. But the most extended system permits only 9 million people to vote. Three persons out of four are excluded. And more than this, they are excluded by the fourth.

The Reason on Why Voting is Restricted

Bastiat makes another claim as to why the franchise is so sought after. He says that people clamor for the right to vote because they know the law can be exploited in their favor or against them. That alone is enough to prove that the law is corrupted.

If the law were confined to its proper functions, everyone’s interest in the law would be the same. Is it not clear that, under these circumstances, those who voted could not inconvenience those who did not vote?

The Fatal Idea of Legal Plunder

“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 …. Then certainly every class will aspire to grasp the law, and logically so.”

That is what we continue to experience today. Each interest group lobbies for its piece of protection. Some lobby for special privaleges that they couldn’t achieve on a free market. I can understand the firms that lobby as a defensive strategy to protect itself from the initial government interference. I can even support those firms that are successful in unchaining themselves from government shackles so long as they do not encourage those same restrictions on their competitors.

He demanded, “And what can you say to answer that argument!”

Perverted Law Causes Conflict

He began, “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.”

He appealed to the American system, circa 1850, as an example of law being kept in its proper place. That is not to say it was perfect, Bastiat said, but “there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation.”

Those contradictions were slavery and tariffs, as Bastiat identified. How salient is it then that 10 years later the United States would go to war with itself and lose 650,000 lives over those two issues? It was during Reconstruction that the KKK and other hate groups emerged and poisoned race relations.

Slavery and Tarrifs Are Plunder

“Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.” The sentence that follows is chilling in its accuracy. “It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime—a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World—should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union.

You can date the destruction of the American ideal back to the Civil War. It was no longer a union of the “united States of America,” as penned in the Decloration of Indepenence, but the Union of The United States of America.

Two Kinds of Plunder

Here Bastiat destinguished between legal and illegal plunder. “The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world,” as it should he said. It is the legal plunder that ignored, he believed.

That is evident in the halls of congress. Politicians and the media rightfully condemn the actions of Wall Street cheats and pyramid scheme hucksters but never mention their own budget and accounting fibs or the biggest ponzi organizations to date, the Social Security Administration.

The Law Defends Plunder

Bastiat’s point here was that the law is sometimes used as a middleman for this plunder. The law spares these crooks “the shame, danger, and scruples which their acts would otherwise involve … and treats the victim—when he defends himself—as a criminal.”

I made the same argument in one of my latest posts on the site. The classic example of this is tax protesters losing their homes as a punishment for refusing to back taxes imposed upon them.

How to Identify Legal Plunder

It’s simple, really, he said. “See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it 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 solution? That’s even simpler. “Abolish the law without delay.”

“The present-day delusion [of these acquired privelages] is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.”

Legal Plunder Has Many Names

There are many, for sure, including “tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.”

Socialism is Legal Plunder

The remedy to fight socialism is not more law.

But it is upon the law that socialism itself relies. Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. … For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.

The solution is to not elect socialists and strike bad laws. Bastiat fears though this is going to be a difficult struggle “so long as legal plunder continues to be the main business of the legislature.”

The Choice Before Us

According to Bastiat, voters have three choices: “the few plunder the many,” “everybody plunder everybody,” or “nobody plun
der anybody.”

It is the third choice. “This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs.”

The Proper Function of the Law

“Law is organized justice.” Simple as that.

The Seductive Lure of Socialism

“It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic.” Bastiat warned that these uses for the law are contradictory. “We must choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free.”

Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty

To critics, limiting the law to the enforcement of justice is unsatisfactory. They believe law should be used to bind the nation together under a system of justice and in a common experience. Bastiat answered that the “second half of your program will destroy the first.”

In fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally trampled underfoot.

Plunder Violates Ownership

So what is plunder?

When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it–without his consent without compensation, and whether by force or fraud—to anyone who does not own it, then I say that property is violated; that an act of plunder is committed.

I think the word “plunder” is accurate historically and metaphysically. Early plunders practiced their crafts on the high seas, demanding payment as if it were their right to do so. A thief on the other hand has no pretense that he has any claim to another person’s property. A government is true to form. It demands its booty because it believes it has a right to the loot.

Law is Force

If the law is to organize justice, Bastiat said, “the socialists ask why the law should not also organize labor, education, and religion.”

In order to organize these acts, it must first destroy justice, which is the very basis for law in the first place. “When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others.”

Law is a Negative Concept

Bastiat’s sentence that the law is not meant to create justice but to prevent injustice is so profound, despite being so simple, that it bears repeating. “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.”

“But when the law … imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed–then the the law is no longer negative …. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives.”

He added, “… you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.”

The Political Approach

[The politician] attempts to remedy the evil [of inequality] by increasing and perpetuating the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder. We have seen that justice is a negative concept. Is there even one of these positive legal actions that does not contain the principle of plunder?

The Law and Charity

Bastiat said, “The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.”

The Law and Education

Bastiat said that the law provides just two options for funding education: “It can It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge.”

The Law and Morals

But there are some who lack morals or religion. Yet you cannot regulate one’s morality with anymore success than you can regulate one’s thoughts.

For the first time that I remember, Bastiat refered to we. He doesn’t distinguish what he means by that just yet. “Because we ask so little from the law—only justice—the socialists thereby assume that we reject fraternity, unity, organization, and association. The socialists brand us with the name individualist.”

Socialists do not actually support fraternity, or unity, or organization, he said. They support forced fraternity, forced unity, and forced organization. What they support are handcuffs and chains, nothing more.

A Confusion of Terms

Bastiat said that socialist conflate the people and the government, so “every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.”

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain [emphasis mine].

The Influence of Socialist Wirters

In one of Bastiat’s longest headings, he dates this conceited thinking that someone should direct the lives of others to a central idea, the wrongheaded belief “that people are inert matter, passive particles, motionless atoms, at best a kind of vegetation indifferent to its own manner of existence. They assume that people are susceptible to being shaped—by the will and hand of another person—into an infinite variety of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected.”

He continued, “And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings.”

The Socialists Wish to Play God

It is necessary to conclude then that socialists, Bastiat said,

will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon. … 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!

The Socialists Despise Mankind

How fortunate we must be that “While mankind tends toward evil, the legislators yearn for good; while mankind advances toward darkness, the legislators aspire for enlightenment; while mankind is drawn toward vice, the legislators are attracted toward virtue.” What a farce.

A Defense of Compulsory Labor

Bastiat quotes a French turor who yearns for the long-failed Egyptian civilization’s ever-present direction by the state: “Among the good laws, one of the best was that everyone was trained (by whom) to obey them. As a result of this, Egypt was filled with wonderful inventions, and nothing was neglected that coul
d make life easy and quiet.”

Bastiat’s quip, “by whom,” handsomely negates the idea with just the most minute effort. The answer is rulers, with force.

A Defense of Paternal Government

The tutor continues his defense of the Egyptians, whom he claimed to be the source of progress for the early Greeks.

“And according to [the tutor], the Greek people, although exceedingly intelligent, had no sense of personal responsibility; like dogs and horses, they themselves could not have invented the most simple games” such as “exercises, foot races, and horse and chariot races…. But the best thing that the Egyptians had taught the Greeks was to become docile, and to permit themselves to be formed by the law for the public good.”

(Part 3 to follow with “The Idea of a Passive Mankind”)

The edition I’ve chosen to read was reproduced by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1998 and includes an introduction by Walter E. Williams and a forward by Sheldon Richmond.

The Law

Only two paragraphs long, this section highlights the dramatic reversal that the rule of law has taken in post-Napoleonic France, and no doubt elsewhere. In part he says, “The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish!”

Life Is a Gift from God

He claims that life consists of “the physical, intellectual, and moral life.” By applying our mental faculties and harnessing our natural resources, all of which he believes a higher supernatural being is responsible for creating, we are able to convert our labor into products.

Now these three foundational principles (life, faculties, and production) stair-step onto one another into what we call life. It’s not all so different than another logical sequence that justifies the three stages of freedom, that is life, liberty, property. Life is freedom in the future tense; liberty is freedom in the present; and property is the freedom to posses one’s past.

Insightfully, he says that these three principles did not come about because of the existence of law, well no more than law came before the existence of life itself. Rather, law came about because of the existence of these principles.

What is Law

He said, “It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.”

He says that if a person possess these natural individual rights, then he or she shall have the right to defend these rights. If that is true, the logical extension is that a group of people may get together to defend these rights collectively. He calls this a collective right. But the term has much different meaning that it does today, where a collective right like the claim to free education actually usurps individual rights because an individual’s property must be seized in order to fund that act.

In fact, today’s collective rights are more akin to privileges than actual rights. As more and more actual rights are being ignored, we are given these revocable privileges in their place. These privileges are subject to the state’s discretion and outright termination.

Bastiat said that no group of people has the right to infringe on the right of another individual because no person in that group has that right to take another person’s life, destroy his property, or enslave him. A group does not conjure rights above and beyond those of its individual members.

He said, “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.”
“A Just and Enduring Government” A government formed with that understanding, Bastiat said, would be just and tolerant, “whatever its political form might be.”

‘When successful, we would no have to thank the state for our success,” Bastiat said. “And, conversely, when unsuccessful, we would no more think of blaming the state for our misfortune than would the farmers blame the state because of hail or frost.”

The Complete Perversion of the Law

Bastiat warns of the law straying from its original intent, “The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. … 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.”

He says there are two main culprits for this perversion of law, “stupid greed” and “false philanthropy.”

A Fatal Tendency of Mankind

“When they can,” he said, “[people] wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. … This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man—in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.”

I believe human beings are morally neutral, neither good nor bad by default. The philosophy one holds and the actions one takes are what define a person’s morality. This desire to live at the expense of others is very real. It’s also dependent on a very short-term outlook. In the long run, trade and mutual cooperation are the greatest means of advancement.

But in short-term survivalist cultures, complex and paradoxical ideas like comparative advantage are not fully realized because people are not willing to lend themselves to reason for survival. The cause for that rejection of reason is controversial itself, having to do with superstition and rituals more than anything else.

Property and Plunder

Man has two choices, Bastiat reminds, production or plunder.

Our wants and needs, which include all the possible wants and needs of every future generation, are infinite. He said that since “man is naturally inclined to avoid pain—and since labor is pain in itself—it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work.”

The solution then is to make plunder more painful than production. As a consequence, “the proper purpose of law is to use power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency ….” Knowing this, those plunders then take the reigns of law to become the “invincible weapon of injustice.”

Victims of Lawful Plunder

Bastiat claims that there are two types of classes, and each has drastically different purposes. “Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.”

This not some radical new chain of thoughts, after all. As more and more people get wise to the fact that their own wealth is being taken, they seek to take part in it themselves. Eventually , or inevitably, this pyramid scheme runs out of suckers to pay for it. Then, we have a circumstance that too many hard-working Americans find themselves today, with their wealth drained, their self control stripped, and their will power crushed.

The Results of Legal Plunder

At it’s core, legal plunder turns justice on its head and manipulates our strong sense of allegiance to the state.

“There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate,” Bastiat said. “This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to
decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them”

(Part 2 to follow with “The Fate of the Non-Conformists”)