Tuesday, 30 June 2015
Happy Birthday, Bastiat!
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

Two hundred and fourteen years ago today, Frederic Bastiat (shown) was born. His life was cut short by disease, but before he turned 50, he had written several seminal works, including a powerful pamphlet that would expose the organized plunder that is the government.

In words that echoed those of the Declaration of Independence penned some 73 years prior, Bastiat declared in The Law:

Zitat

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We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this 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. 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.

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Man gets his rights from God and to protect those rights from each other, man institutes government. There is, Bastiat insists, no other rightful role of government than to act as a collective organization of man’s individual natural rights.

"The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all."

Recognizing that in his own country and in his own time government had usurped powers far beyond that limited roster granted to it, Bastiat proposed perversion of the law as the cause. He observed:

Zitat

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But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

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More:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/hi...irthday-bastiat

Bastiat's books are available free on multiple web sites. Wiki give several links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat

so does:
http://bastiat.org/

and:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=cre...%2C+Frederic%22