Libertas

Frédéric Bastiat

Bastiat begins with a call to arms, decrying the perversion of the law. Instead of checking avarice, it is its tool; instead of punishing iniquity, it is guilty of it. Life – physical, intellectual, and moral – comes from God, but He “has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, developing it, and of perfecting it.” He has given us certain abilities and gifts, placing us in a world where we are to use them, joining together, to accomplish and obtain: life, liberty, and property.

These three precede law. They are not born from law; the law is born from them. Men do not make laws to have life, liberty, and property; they make laws because they have life, liberty, and property. What then is the law? “It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.”

Nature or God has provided each soul with the right to defend one’s own person, liberty, and property, because they are the preserving elements of life. Each becomes complete by the others and understood in conjunction with the others. What are our abilities but the extension of our personalities? What is property but the extension of our abilities?

If each person has the right to defend, even by force, one’s own person, liberty, or property, then so too does a group have the same right to organize a common defense. Collective right, therefore, has its source, its principal, it reason, and existence in individual right. Collective right may not then have any other mission than to substitute for a collection of individuals. Thus, if an individual may not lawfully use force to touch on the life, liberty, or property of another, neither may the collective lawfully touch on the life, liberty, or property of individuals or classes.

Would that not be a perversion of the premise? If no individual has the right to take from another, how could a collective of individuals have that right? The law, therefore, is “the organization of natural right of lawful defense.” It is the substitution of collective force for individual force in order to secure and protect life, liberty, and property. This is its only proper function: “to cause justice to reign over all.”

A people organized in this way, Bastiat believes, “would have the most simple, the most economical, the least oppressive, the least to be felt, the most restrained, the most just, and consequently, the most stable Government, whatever its political form may be.” Under this administration, all would possess the fullness and responsibility of their existence. As long as the State ensured personal safety kept labor free, as well as its fruits, “no one would have any difficulties to contend within the State.” When successful, no one would have to thank the State; when unsuccessful, no one would think to blame the State.

Thanks to the non-intervention of the State in private affairs, we would not see the absurdities and mismanagement typical of government programs. Unfortunately, law has not remained in its proper sphere. It has moved beyond even a questionable sphere of influence. It has done more; “it has acted in direct opposition to its proper end; it has destroyed its own object; it has been employed in annihilating that justice which it ought to have established…it has placed the collective force in the service of those who wish to traffic, without risk and without scruple, in the persons, the liberty, and the property of others; it has converted plunder into a right, that it may protect it, and the lawful defense into a crime, that it may punish it.”

Based on The Law by Frédéric Bastiat