Bastiat’s The Law – 6th session

Monday, December 14, 2020, 6th session

Reading Discussion, 6th Online Meeting

This was our 6th meeting. We have now begun Chapter 2, “The Law.” But in this meeting, we only managed to read about five pages of Chapter 2. The reason was that a fairly in-depth discussion continued on law, and on liberty, so we were not able to make much progress in the book. As for me as well, related questions kept leading to more questions, and this review ended up being quite delayed.

Starting from Chapter 2, Bastiat points out that “the law” has become corrupted.

p. 89 The law has become corrupted. And along with it, the state’s police power has also become corrupted. The law has not merely strayed from its original purpose; rather, it has become something that pursues the exact opposite purpose. The law, which ought to restrain greed, has instead degenerated into a tool for every kind of greed.

And then he speaks of the “life” that “God” gave us, and of the things given to sustain it.

p. 90 God has endowed us with an astonishing bundle of talents. He has also given us abundant resources. (...) Life, faculties, production—in other words, individuality, liberty, property—these three are man himself. (...) It is because man possesses life, liberty, and property that he came to make laws.

p. 90 Law is the collectivization of each individual’s right to legitimate self-defense. (...) If faculties are not an extension of life, then what use are faculties? And if property is not an extension of faculties, then what use is property?

p. 91 Law is the collectivization of man’s God-given right to defend himself lawfully.

p. 92 The Corruption of the Law

The original function of law is to ensure that the rights each person possesses are not violated by one another, but actual law is destroying the boundaries between rights. It is also mobilizing collective force so that those who seek to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others can do so without the slightest hesitation. By attaching the name of “right” to acts of plunder, the law has transformed plunder into a right.

Once again, I realized that the problem of law is by no means confined to recent circumstances. As in my earlier review, I came across passages showing that for 200 years we have always faced much the same situation.

I found the earlier phrase “given by God” especially interesting. On that point, Taejun and Mori exchanged opposing views. It is unfortunate that I cannot fully reproduce here all of their learning and the logic of their arguments.

As I listened to this discussion, I thought I would write down the thoughts I organized for myself.

What I have definitely been digging into under the current administration is the concept of “liberty.” I almost feel grateful for that.

My recent concern is whether that “liberty”

(1) is something given by “someone, or from somewhere” (externally),

or

(2) can be seen as something that emerges spontaneously within human relationships (internally).

(1) Looking at modern history, and even through the recently and passionately watched *Vikings*, as well as by personal intuition, it certainly seems to be given from the “outside.”

In the past, liberty was conferred by some “external” thing through its representative, the “priest,” and it was also conferred through the “king.” If we follow the U.S. Constitution, each individual’s liberty appears to be protected through “law.” In the end, we may infer that there were clear limits to liberty being granted through “judgment involving human intervention.”

In this way, if we regard “liberty” as something given from the “outside” to every individual, then it becomes clear that every individual, as such, cannot be violated by anyone. That liberty is more precious than any other value, and I think it is no different from life itself.

And every individual who has been granted liberty can freely make use of his or her own unique “faculties” (including those regarded as disadvantages), making possible the “production and ownership of private property” necessary for one’s life. And that property cannot be infringed upon by anyone.

This line of reasoning seems entirely self-evident.

To elaborate a bit more, physicist Sangwook Kim talks about this in the YouTube video below.

[Why Sangwook Kim, a Ph.D. scientist and atheist, thinks religion cannot be completely denied 181130 EP11

- “Human beings may kill livestock at will, but who exactly gave them that ‘right’?”

- “From a scientist’s point of view, there is no great difference between a human and a pig.”]

A post by a friend on Facebook happened to strike me very deeply.

Chan-gyo Kang: “Prejudice. Recently, in South Korea and across the world, social issues making very significant advances are fairness and justice.”

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2698007717104203&id=100006850036613&comment_id=2698269880411320¬if_id=1608284999116397¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic_tagged&ref=notif

- “The same is true of moral prejudices. Ideas such as ‘All people have equal rights,’ or ‘It is wrong to kill an innocent person without reason,’ are moral common sense that many people accept not as prejudice but as justice. But can we really say that these moral propositions are not prejudices? Why exactly do people have equal rights? And who exactly granted us those rights? Unless we assume God or some supernatural being like natural-rights theorists do, there is not the slightest metaphysical reason to presuppose equal rights. If propositions such as ‘Black people cannot enjoy rights equal to white people,’ or ‘Women are inferior beings to men,’ are prejudices, then the proposition ‘All people have equal liberty and rights’ is also a prejudice. A similar argument can be made regarding the issue of killing people.”

After reading this passage, I came to think that the “liberty” Bastiat speaks of, and that I also think is important, must be a kind of “prejudice” to some people. There are simply those who accept it and those who do not. (Perhaps the majority are not very interested in it at all. I used to be the same.)

In other words, it seems to me that people are divided between those who believe that each individual, their liberty, and their private property must not be infringed, and those who believe that this is a mistaken idea, a prejudice. And the world has always been one in which the latter are more numerous.

The reason there are more people of the latter view seems fairly clear. For tens of thousands of years we have enjoyed only “limited liberty” granted by “other humans” (from birth, we cannot help but depend on parents or something similar; after growing up, we probably depended on “tribal chiefs” for tens of thousands of years; even as times changed, until quite recently we depended on “priests” and “kings”). It is difficult for the memory in our DNA to change so easily. And even now, there are many who profit from this system, so I sometimes wonder whether expecting change is, perhaps, a naive thought.

(2) As for whether spontaneous emergence is possible, I still do not know very well. At least in the Northeast Asian cultural sphere to which I belong, it seems like a rather remote idea. Perhaps for that reason, I do not even have a good sense yet of how to conceptualize it. Mori showed greater interest in this point and spoke about it more, and as I listened I felt that my understanding was gradually broadening.

During the discussion, we talked about Father Andrew Kim Taegon, the first person in the Joseon Dynasty to go abroad for study and learn Western Learning, as well as his family and the historical background of his time. They clearly overcame prejudice, dreamed of an equal society rather than a status-based one, and sought to realize it. Yet in the end, outwardly speaking, they were unable to realize that dream and could only be persecuted and martyred.

Mori remarked that perhaps this would only have been possible if there had been a sufficiently strong social base to support him. The explanation was that in Europe, as commerce developed, there were people who accumulated wealth above a certain level through it, and because of that the concept of “liberty” could spread more widely through society and become established.

As we kept having these discussions endlessly (even after we had said our goodbyes, we continued talking for another 20 minutes), we did not get very far in the book. But instead, I was left with an enormous number of things to think about.

If you would like to join the online reading group every Monday evening, I invite you to the open chat room at the link below.

https://open.kakao.com/o/gX3OIqtb

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Original title: 바스티아 <법>-6차

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseotoronmoim

Date: 2020-12-14

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=7&idx=23366