OMalley's Forum:

Reading Bastiat made me keenly aware of all the time wasted, along with the frustrations of going down one blind alley after another, organizing my philosophy of life. The Law did not produce a philosophical conversion for me as much as it created order in my thinking about liberty and just human conduct.

Many philosophers have made important contributions to the

discourse on liberty, Bastiat among them. But Bastiat’s greatest

contribution is that he took the discourse out of the ivory tower

and made ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlettered can

understand them and statists cannot obfuscate them. Clarity is

crucial to persuading our fellowman of the moral superiority of

personal liberty.

Like others,Bastiat recognized that the greatest single threat to

liberty is government. Notice the clarity he employs to help us

identify and understand evil government acts such as legalized

plunder. Bastiat says,“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.”With such an accurate description of legalized plunder,

we cannot deny the conclusion that most government activities,

including ours, are legalized plunder, or for the sake of modernity,

legalized theft.

Frederic Bastiat could have easily been a fellow traveler of the

signers of our Declaration of Independence. The signers’ vision of

liberty and the proper role of government was captured in the

immortal words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all

men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with

certain Unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and

the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, governments

are instituted among Men. . . .”

Bastiat echoes the identical vision, saying, “Life, faculties, production—in other words individuality, liberty, property—that is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.”

Bastiat gave the same rationale for government as did our Founders, saying,“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”No finer statements of natural or God-given rights have been made than those found in our Declaration of Independence and The Law.

Bastiat pinned his hopes for liberty on the United States saying,“. . . look at the United States.There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation.”Writing in 1850, Bastiat noted two areas where the United States fell short: “Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty.The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.”