The law and legal plunder
What law is for
Frédéric Bastiat published The Law in 1850, in a France where every faction wanted to use the state for its own program. His starting point is simple. Each person has a natural right to defend their person, their liberty, and their property. The law is the collective organization of that individual right to self-defense. Nothing more.
The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces... to guarantee persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.
Because the law is only the pooled right of defense, it cannot rightfully do what an individual could not rightfully do. You may not take your neighbor's harvest to feed your family. A law that does the same thing on your behalf does not make it just.
Legal plunder
Bastiat's most useful tool is a test:
See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
He calls the result legal plunder. Tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, and progressive taxation all qualify in his list. He is not saying the beneficiaries are villains. He is saying the mechanism is the same regardless of who benefits.
Why is legal plunder more dangerous than ordinary theft? Because it wears the uniform of justice. When the law itself takes, people stop being able to tell justice from injustice. The response to plunder becomes a scramble to be on the receiving end, and politics turns into a contest over who gets to use the law against whom.
The seen and the unseen
In a companion essay, Bastiat tells the story of a shopkeeper's broken window. Onlookers console him: the glazier gets work, and money circulates. What they do not see is the pair of shoes the shopkeeper would have bought instead. The window is replaced, and the town is poorer by one pair of shoes.
Every public program has a seen side, the visible benefit, and an unseen side, whatever the taxed money and diverted labor would otherwise have done. A good citizen trains themselves to ask about the unseen.
The two errors
Bastiat names two mistakes that keep the machinery of plunder running:
- False philanthropy. The belief that because something is good, the law should mandate it. He answers that the law can only force, and forcing charity destroys the charity.
- The legislator as sculptor. The idea that people are clay and lawmakers are artists. He answers that the lawmaker is a person like any other, with no special claim to shape everyone else.
Try it
Take one line item from your city or county budget. Apply the test. Who pays, who receives, and could the receiver have obtained it from the payer without the law? Then list the unseen: what would that money have done otherwise?
Sources are public domain: Bastiat, The Law (1850) and That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen (1850).