Bastiat, The Law, Part II, Episode 20

This is the first part of our reading of Bastiat's The Law with a short introduction by Brian tying the ideas in the essay to the properties inherent in Bitcoin.

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Transcript

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Welcome back. This is episode 19 of Love and Hard Money. I'm Brian, and this is part two of our series on The Law by Frederick Bastiat. Today we're going to start reading. But before we do, I want to put something in front of you that's been on my mind since the last episode. You know the line from the Declaration of Independence? Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Everyone knows it. What fewer people know is that Jefferson lifted that triad almost directly from John Locke. Except Locke's version didn't say pursuit of happiness. It said life, liberty, and estate. Property. The right to own the fruits of your labor. Jefferson knew Locke cold, and George Mason, drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights just weeks earlier, used language close to Locke's original. Jefferson read it and then made a choice, for whatever reason, philosophical, political, I don't know, to swap property for pursuit of happiness. I'm not here to relitigate Jefferson. He's one of my favorite American founding fathers. The Declaration is still one of the great documents in human history, but notice what that substitution did. Pursuit of happiness is a process. It's intangible. You can't hold it, store it, or pass it to your children. Property is concrete. It's enforceable. It's the thing that actually stands between you and someone who wants to take what you built. When you leave it out of your founding document, you leave a door open. Bastiat walks right through that door and picks up what Jefferson set down. His opening argument is essentially here's what Americans meant to say Life, Liberty, and Property. The only legitimate purpose of the law is to defend all three. That's where I want you to plant your flag as we start reading today. When Bastiat says property, he means something precise, the fruit of your labor, the thing that you made, grew, built, or earned, not something granted by a government, and hold that definition next to Bitcoin. When you hold Bitcoin, you hold something that can't be diluted, seized via inflation, or conjured away by a central bank decision. It's property in Bastiat's purest sense, the direct product of your economic energy stored in a form that no one can legally plunder without your private key. The founders left the property door open. The Fed walked through it. Satoshi closed it. Okay. Here's Frederick Bastiat's The Law from the Beginning. The law perverted the law and in its wake all the collective forces of the nation. The law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary. The law become the tool of every kind of avarice instead of being its check. The law, guilty of that very inequity, which it was its mission to punish. Truly this is a serious fact if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens. We hold from God the gift which as far as we are concerned contains all others life, physical, intellectual, and moral life. But life cannot support itself. He who has bestowed it has entrusted us with the care of supporting it, of developing it, and of perfecting it. To that end he has provided us with a collection of wonderful faculties. He has plunged us into the midst of a variety of elements. It is by the application of our faculties to these elements that the phenomena of assimilation and appropriation by which life pursues the circle which has been assigned to it are realized Existence Fulties Assilation in other words personality, liberty property. This is man. It is of these three things that it may be said, apart from all demagogue subtlety, that they are anterior and superior to all human legislation. It is not because men have made laws that personality, liberty, and property exist. On the contrary, it is because personality, liberty, and property exist beforehand that men make laws. What then is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life, elements, each of which is rendered complete by the others, and cannot be understood without them. For what are our faculties but the extension of our personality? And what is property but the extension of our faculties? If every man has the right of defending, even by force, his person, his liberty, and his property, a number of men have the right to combine together, to extend, to organize a common force, to provide regularly for this defense. Collective right, then, has its principle, its reason for existing, its lawfulness in individual right, and the common force cannot rationally have any other end or any other mission than that of the isolated forces for which it is substituted. Thus, as the force of an individual cannot lawfully touch the person, the liberty or the property of another individual, for the same reason, the common force cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, the liberty, or the property of individuals or of classes. For this perversion of force would be, in one case, as in the other, in contradiction to our premises. For who will dare to say that force has been given to us not to defend our rights, but to annihilate the equal rights of our brethren? And if this be not true of every individual force acting independently, how can it be true of the collective force, which is only the organized union of isolated forces? Nothing, therefore, can be more evident than this. The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of collective for individual forces, for the purpose of acting in the sphere in which they have the right to act, of doing what they have the right to do, to secure persons, liberties, and properties, and to maintain each in its right, so as to cause justice to reign over all. And if a people established upon this basis were to exist, it seems to me that order would prevail among them in their acts as well as in their ideas. It seems to me that such a people would have the most simple, most economical, and least oppressive, the least to be felt, the least responsible, the most just, and consequently the most solid government which could be imagined, whatever its political form might be. For under such an administration, everyone would feel that he possessed all the fullness as well as all the responsibility of his existence, so long as personal safety was ensured, so long as labor was free, and the fruits of labor secured against all unjust attacks, no one would have any difficulties to contend with in the state. When prosperous, we should not, it is true, have to thank the state for our success, but when unfortunate, we should no more think of taxing it with our disasters than our peasants think of attributing it to the arrival of hail or frost. We should know it only by the inestimable blessing of safety. It may further be affirmed that thanks to the non-intervention of the state in private affairs, our wants and their satisfactions would develop themselves in their natural order. We should not see poor families seeking for literary instruction before they were supplied with bread. We should not see towns peopled at the expense of rural districts, nor rural districts at the expense of towns. We should not see those great displacements of capital, of labor, and of population, which legislative measures occasion, displacements which render so uncertain and precarious the very sources of existence, and thus aggravate to such an extent the responsibility of governments. Unhappily, law is by no means confined to its own department, nor is it merely in some indifferent and debatable views that it has left its proper sphere. It has done more than this. 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, in effacing amongst rights, that limit which was its true mission to respect. 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 lawful defense into a crime that it may punish it. Okay, we'll stop there for this week. Come back next Tuesday for the next section. Or if you can't wait to jump ahead, check out the law for free from the Mises Institute at Mises.org. That's M I S E S dot O R G. Thanks for listening to Love and Hard Money.