Bastiat, The Law, Part IIII, Episode 22

We continue our reading of Frederic Bastiat's famous essay, The Law.  The full text is available for free here: https://cdn.mises.org/thelaw.pdf

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Love and Hard Money. I'm Brian. This is episode 22, part four of our series on the law. Today, Bastiat takes on the big systems, the political philosophies of his day that were gaining momentum in post-revolutionary France. Socialism, communism, theocracy. What he calls the three systems of plunder organized at scale. What's remarkable is how clearly he sees the fatal flaw in all of them. It's not that the people promoting these ideas are evil. Bastiat's actually pretty charitable about their intentions. The flaw is structural. Every one of these systems requires someone to be in charge of redistributing resources. Someone has to decide who gets what, and that someone, no matter how well intentioned, is doing two things simultaneously. Using law as a tool of plunder and claiming to know better than individuals what is good for them. Bastiat calls this the fatal idea. The belief that a lawmaker can, through legislation, turn society into whatever shape he imagines. This matters for Bitcoin in a specific way. One of the things people misunderstand about Bitcoin is that it's apolitical. It doesn't care which system wins. Socialism, crony capitalism, it doesn't matter. Any system that relies on controlling the money supply to implement its vision is a system that Bitcoin resists at the protocol level. Because Bitcoin doesn't ask who's in charge of redistribution. It removes redistribution as an option. There is no lever to pull. There is no fatal idea that can be encoded into the money itself. That's not anarchy, or maybe it is. It's rules without rulers. That's Bastiat's proper law, built into software. Okay, let's read. The law can only produce one of these results partial plunder. This is the system that prevailed so long as the elective privilege was partial, a system that is resorted to to avoid the invasion of socialism. Universal plunder We have been threatened by this system when the elective privilege has become universal, the masses having conceived the idea of making law on the principle of legislators who had preceded them. Absence of plunder This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, consolation, and of good sense, which I shall proclaim with all the force of my lungs, which is very inadequate, alas, till the day of my death. And in all sincerity, can anything more be required at the hands of the law? Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to everyone his right? I defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right. And as this is the most fatal, the most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined, it must be admitted that the true solution so much sought after of the social problem is contained in these simple words. Law is organized justice. Now it is important to remark that to organize justice by law, that is to say by force, excludes the idea of organizing by law or by force any manifestation whatever of human activity labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, instruction, the fine arts, or religion. For any one of these organizings would inevitably destroy the essential organization. How, in fact, can we imagine force encroaching upon the liberty of citizens without infringing upon justice, and so acting against its proper aim? Here I am taking on the most popular prejudice of our time. It is not considered enough that law should be just, it must be philanthropic. It is not sufficient that it should guarantee to every citizen free and inoffensive exercise of his faculties applied to his physical, intellectual, and moral development. It is required to extend well-being, instruction, and morality directly over the nation. This is the fascinating side of socialism. But, I repeat it, these two missions of the law contradict each other. We have to choose between them. A citizen cannot at the same time be free and not free. Mr De Le Martin wrote to me one day thus Your doctrine is only half of my program. You have stopped at liberty. I go on to fraternity. I answered him The second part of your program will destroy the first. And in fact, it is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly conceive fraternity legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and justice legally trampled under foot. Legal plunder has two roots. One of them, we have already seen, is in human greed, the other is in misconceived philanthropy. Before I proceed, I think I ought to explain myself upon the word plunder. I do not take it as it is often taken, in a vague, undefined, relative or metaphorical sense. I use it in its scientific acceptation, and as expressing the opposite idea to property. When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent and without compensation, to him who has not created it, whether by force or by artifice, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated. I say that this is exactly what the law ought to repress, always and everywhere. If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances. In this case, however, he who profits from the plunder is not responsible for it. It is the law, the law giver, society itself. And this is where the political danger lies. It is to be regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I have sought in vain for another, for I would not wish at any time, and especially just now, to add an irritating word to our disagreements. Therefore, whether I am believed or not, I declare that I do not mean to impunge the intentions nor the morality of anybody. I am attacking an idea that I believe to be false, a system that appears to me to be unjust, and this is so independent of intentions that each of us profits by it without wishing it, and suffers from it without being aware of the cause. Any person must write under the influence of party spirit or of fear, who would call into question the sincerity of protectionism, of socialism, and even of communism, which are one and the same plant in three different periods of its growth. All that can be said is that plunder is more visible by its partiality and protectionism, and by its universality and communism. Whence it follows that, of the three systems, socialism is still the most vague, the most undefined, and consequently the most sincere. Be that as it may, to conclude that legal plunder has one of its roots in misconceived philanthropy is evidently to put intentions out of the question. With this understanding, let us examine the value, the origin, and the tendency of this popular aspiration, which pretends to realize the general good by general plunder. The socialists say, since the law organizes justice, why should it not organize labor, instruction, and religion? Why? Because it could not organize labor, instruction, and religion without disorganizing justice. For remember that law is force, and that consequently the domain of the law cannot properly extend beyond the domain of force. When law and force keep a man within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing upon him but a mere negation. They only oblige him to abstain from doing harm. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They only guard the personality, the liberty, the property of others. They hold themselves on the defensive, they define the equal right of all. They fulfill a mission whose harmlessness is evident, whose utility is palpable, and whose legitimacy is not to be disputed. This is so true that as a friend of mine once remarked to me, to say that the aim of the law is to cause justice to reign is to use an expression that is not rigorously exact. It ought to be said that the aim of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is not justice that has an existence of its own, it is injustice. The one results from the absence of the other. But when the law, through the medium of its necessary agent, force, imposes a form of labor, a method or subject of instruction, a creed or a worship, it is no longer negative. It acts positively upon men. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own will, the initiative of the legislator for their own initiative. They have no need to consult, to compare, to foresee. The law does all of that for them. The intellect is, for them, a useless encumbrance. They cease to be men, they lose their personality, their liberty, their property. Try to imagine a form of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty, a transmission of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot succeed in reconciling this, you are bound to conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice. When, from the seclusion of his office, a politician takes a view of society, he is struck with the spectacle of inequality that presents itself. He mourns over the suffering that there are the lot of so many of our brethren suffering, under whose aspect is rendered yet more sorrowful by the contrast of luxury and wealth. He ought perhaps to ask himself whether such a social state has not been caused by the plunder of ancient times, exercised in the way of conquests, and by plunder of more recent times, effected through the medium of laws. He ought to ask himself whether granting the aspiration of all men to well-being and improvement, the reign of justice would not suffice to realize the greatest activity of progress, and the greatest amount of equality compatible with that of individual responsibility that God has awarded as just retribution of virtue and vice? He never gives this a thought. His mind turns towards combinations, arrangements, legal factions, organizations. He seeks the remedy in perpetuating and exaggerating what has produced the evil. For justice apart, which we have seen is only a negation, is there any one of these legal arrangements that does not contain the principle of plunder? You say there are men who have no money, and you apply to the law. But the law is not a self-supplied fountain, whence every stream may obtain supplies independently of society. Nothing can enter the public treasury in favor of one citizen or one class, but what other citizens and other classes have been forced to send to it. If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for men who want money. It does not promote equality. It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one party to give to another. And then it is an instrument of plunder. Examine in this light the protection of tariffs, subsidies, right to profit, right to labor, right to assistance, free public education, progressive taxation, gratuitousness of credit, social workshops, and you will find at the bottom legal plunder, organized injustice. You say there are men who want knowledge, and you apply to the law, but the law is not a torch that sheds light that originates within itself. It extends over a society where there are men who have knowledge and others who have not, citizens who want to learn, and others who are disposed to teach. It can only do one of two things, either allow a free operation of this kind of transaction, i.e., let this kind of want satisfy itself freely, or else preempt the will of the people in the matter, and take from some of them sufficient to pay professors commission to instruct others for free. But in the second case, there cannot fail to be a violation of liberty and property, legal plunder. You say, Here are men who are wanting in morality or religion, and you apply to the law. But law is force, and need I say how far it is a violent and absurd enterprise to introduce force in these matters? As the result of its systems and its efforts, it would seem that socialism, notwithstanding all its self complacency, can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises cleverly from others and even from itself under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association. And because we do not ask so much at the hands of the law, because we only ask it for justice, it alleges that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association, and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds government and society, and so every time we object to a thing being done by government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state, then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion, then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the state, then we are against all equality, etc, etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat, because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state. How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain, prosperity in a positive sense, wealth, science, religion, should ever have gained ground in the political world? The modern politicians, particularly those of the social, a more strange, more presumptuous notion could never have entered a human brain. They divide mankind into two parts, men in general, except one, form the first. The politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important. In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action, and of any means of discernment in themselves, that they have no initiative, that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulse, at best vegetation indifferent to its own existence, susceptible of assuming, from the exterior will an hand of an infinite number of forms more or less symmetrical, artistic, and perfected. Moreover, every one of these politicians does not hesitate to assume that he himself, under the names of organizer, discoverer, legislator, institutor or founder, this will enhance, this universal initiative, this creative power whose sublime mission it is to gather together these scattered materials, that is men, into society. Starting from these data, as a gardener, according to his caprice, shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, cones, vases, espaliers, die staffs, or fans, so the socialist, following his chimera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles, subcircles, honeycombs, or social workshops with all kinds of variations. As the gardener, to bring his trees into shape, needs hatchets, pruning hooks, saws, and shears, so the politician, to bring society into shape, needs the forces which he can only find in the laws the law of tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, and the law of education. Okay, we're gonna wrap up there for today. If you're enjoying love and hard money, let me know what's working and what I can improve. I'm committed to making each episode incrementally better than the last. Thanks for following along.