“The Law”: a book of Bastian

The Law, first published as a pamphlet in June, 1850, was written by Bastiat, Frederic (1801-1850), a french stateman and a legal philosopher of law.

He wrote: “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.”

Because “Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent”and because “law is justice”(see Law is justice: Bastiat ), the real purpose of law is the defense of liberty, life and property. According to Bastiat, law is “the collective organization of the individual right of lawful defense.”Each person should has the right to defend them. A group of people have “collective right”to defend these rights together. Thererore, “the principle of collective right-its reason for existing, its lawfulness-is based on individual right. And this common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute.”

He wrote that “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”Therefore:

“As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose-that it may violate property instead of protecting it-then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious.”

According to Walter E. Williams (from hte George Mason University, Virginia), “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 the greatest single threat to liberty is government.”

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.”

Joseph Schumpeter (the author of the book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”) described Bastiat nearly a century after his death as “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived.”

Bastiat, Frederic , wrote in “A Petition” that:

“We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light, that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price…. This rival … is none other than the sun….

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights and blinds; in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures.”

Author: international