Libertas

Legal Plunder

How has the perversion of law been accomplished?

And what has resulted from it?

Bastiat’s answer is still true today. He says there are two very different causes to this perversion of law: “naked greed and misconceived philanthropy.”

Greed

In the first case, he says that although self-preservation is normal for all, some wish to do so at the expense of others. He claims not to base this thought on pessimism, but on the witness of history. He lists war, migration, oppression, slavery, fraud, and monopoly as examples in history to prove his point.

Labor or Plunder

What is normal and natural for human life, the search for and the development of objects through labor is the origin of property, on the other hand to live and enjoy life by seizing and appropriating from others is the origin of plunder. Bastiat reminds the reader that labor is pain and that if plunder is easier than labor, neither religion nor morality can prevent it from prevailing. Plunder can only cease when it is more troublesome and dangerous than labor.

The Law

Law’s proper aim therefore is to oppose plunder by making it troublesome and dangerous and support property. But lawmakers tend to come from one class, and instead of using law to protect property equally, it is instead used to plunder one class for another. Instead of checking injustice, it is its most invincible instrument. In the hands of the legislator the law destroys in order to plunder. In various degrees, “it destroys personal independence by slavery, liberty by oppression, and property by plunder.”

The oppressed classes have two choices upon gaining control of the state whether it be through legal means or revolution. They may either end the legal plunder or take part in it themselves. If they are not enlightened and are instead so full of rage at the previous injustices, they will not think to abolish plunder but to organize against the other class or party and seek retribution.

A disastrous consequences of this perversion

“Nothing is so evil to society as the “conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

In the first place, the people would lose the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can long last if the laws are not respected, “but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable.”

When law and morality contradict, the citizen must choose between two evils: losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. Because it is so much in the nature of law to support justice it is natural for the people to regard the law as legitimate, going so far to believe that all justice comes from the law.

Claude Frédéric Bastiat (June 30, 1801 – December 24, 1850) a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, writer and member of the French assembly.

It is therefore enough for the law to legitimize plunder for the people to accept it as “just and sacred.” “Slavery, protection and monopoly find defenders, not only by those who profit by them, but in those who suffer by them.” To question the plunder is to question the law; to question the law is to question justice and morality.

Based on The Law by Frédéric Bastiat

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