Bastiat, The Law—Sessions 8 and 9

January 4, 2021 (Mon) 8th

January 11, 2021 (Mon) 9th

Online Reading Discussion Group on *The Law*

Bastiat talks about the original function of the law. He says that even in times when the right to vote was granted only to some citizens, if the law had performed only its original function, those without suffrage would not have needed to worry that their interests might be violated.

He then speaks of his admiration for the United States at the time. He describes it as a country that does an excellent job of guaranteeing the law’s proper function—freedom and property rights. As a result, he remarks that no country stands on a foundation of social order as stable as that of the United States. I found it both new and interesting that the America of the 1840s received this kind of assessment from Bastiat.

P103 There are two kinds of plunder: illegal plunder and legal plunder. (...) One need only determine whether the law takes property from someone and gives it to someone else.

P104 All of these means of legal plunder taken together become socialism.

P106 Plunder can be divided into three kinds: plunder by the few against the many (partial plunder), plunder by everyone against everyone else (universal plunder), and a state in which no one plunders anyone (the absence of plunder).

P106 What else can proper law do except protect everyone’s rights? If the law attempts to do more than that, the result that follows is inevitably “the violation of human rights.”

P108 What I call plunder is exact and scientific, and I mean by it the very opposite of the concept of private property. If property is transferred, without the owner’s consent and without compensation, from the owner to someone who did not create that property, then whether the means is force or fraud, I call it both a violation of property rights and plunder.

P110 Justice is a condition in which what is unjust has disappeared.

P112 If the law is to be a means of practicing equality, it must take from someone and give to someone else. Therefore, it cannot help but become a means of plunder.

Bastiat says that the violation of private property through the use of law is “legal plunder.” Law exists to protect life and property from the infringement of others. It seems that the “perversion of the law” begins when it is used as a means of realizing “equality.” Can anyone really judge that taking “someone’s” property away from “someone” and distributing it to “someone else” is a better thing to do?

And yet, at the time, countless politicians and scholars claimed—as if they stood in the position of God—that this was possible and right, and they carried it out by force. It is astonishing. Perhaps in the 1800s this can be somewhat excused, since the concept of liberty was less widely understood, there was less experience with or documentation of the free market economy system and therefore less sufficient evidence to support it, and the cost of accessing such information was also high. But the fact that even now, in 2021, there are still so many people who believe and judge themselves to be like “God” and seek to reconstruct things remains astonishing the more one thinks about it.

In the latter part of Chapter 2, Bastiat presents the arguments of politicians and scholars who claim to stand in the position of “God.” What they say is not very different from what politicians say today. They insist that they are good, and that others must follow their plans and decisions. They regard the general public as foolish people who will cause trouble if left alone, and so they try to rule over them.

Bastiat concludes Chapter 2 from a Christian perspective.

P154 God has given human beings the things necessary to fulfill their destiny. Just as He has given each individual a God-given physiological function, so too has He given society such a function.

Looking back after finishing Chapter 2, it seems that societies can be broadly divided into two major types: one in which “specific individuals or groups” plan and control society, and another that places its emphasis on “freedom,” based on the belief that there is some providence of a being beyond man—such as “God or natural providence.”

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Original title: 바스티아 <법>-8, 9차

Author: Jayujuui Ipmun Dokseotoronmoim

Date: 2021-01-11

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=reading01&pn=6&idx=23408