The Law by Frédéric Bastiat
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Throughout the last few years I remember seeing a news article which caught my eye. It was about a global vote via the UN of whether food should be a fundamental right.
Unsurprisingly, most of the world agreed that it should be so, and why not? Everyone needs food to live, we have enough people dying from starvation while others languish in obesity, so surely this would be a unanimous yes … right?
Alas, it was not to be.
Some countries with veto power declared that it should not, and therefore the vote sailed down the river as though it never happened.
At the time, I was in a state of disbelief. Who would be so evil and villainous to deny such a right to people? Surely there was no justification for this at all! And yet now, years later, after finishing The Law, although I may still disagree with those who voted ‘no’, I can begin to understand why.
Frédéric Bastiat was a French Economist with big ideas on the law and its ideal level of implementation upon people.
According to Bastiat, the only rights that man is born and endowed with by God are the rights to his life, his liberty and his property. This principle forms the foundation of Bastiat’s ideas henceforth.
Since a man has the justification to defend his life, freedom and property, this intention can be outsourced to the collective prowess of society for them to provide protection on his behalf. Such an arrangement would ensure that both the strong and the weak man have equal protection against any transgression of their rights. The collective implementation of law therefore, finds its inherent justification for its existence from the individual.
Since a man cannot use his means to infringe upon the rights of another man’s life, freedom or property, neither then, can the collective, i.e. the law. The law then, exists only to protect the individual from oppression and transgression. It serves as a passive defence, not in any offensive capacity in the least.
Bastiat contrasts this with some of the governments of his time who have no problem with implementing high levels of taxes and tariffs, while ensuring that their dominion over the lives of their peoples ever extends into new realms. When wealth is appropriated from the people without due right, Bastiat terms this ‘plunder’. This usually occurs when members of the government (who have been given the authority beforehand to wield the power of the law) see fit to institutionalise and legislate the means to take the money earned by others and use it towards what they see fit for the claimed ‘good of the nation’.
Since the legislators, those whom wield the power of the law, are the ones who ultimately decide which taxes to raise and lower, which tariffs to implement and rescind, it is inevitable that men from all classes and industries will seek to either influence or enter into politics themselves so as to benefit their respective classes and industries. This results in the realm of politics itself being inflated beyond its intended means as people from all walks of life vie to enter into it and increase their influence. What was once the domain purely of justice focused on securing the life, liberty and property of each man now descends into power politics and corruption at an unprecedented scale.
When these competing classes of people enter into government as legislators, the result is a flurry of laws and legislations which regulate and control domains to such an extent that man feels himself no longer free to engage effectively in his business as he wills. The initial God-given rights championed by Bastiat are inevitably encroached upon and sidelined. Man can no longer expect his wealth (in the form of his money and property) to be safe from plunder by the state. There are new taxes and tariffs he must pay, and consequences if he refuses. Plunder, as Bastiat would undoubtedly say, has become institutionalised.
Thus the law cannibalises itself.
Upon extrapolating this unfortunate situation, we would find a society where the government extends its hands such that they encompass every domain of civic and economic life. There are rules and regulations for everything, and a mans wealth earned by the sweat of his own brow is not safe from being appropriated for the sake of the ‘greater good’, defined of course, by the same legislators who wish to improve their own fortunes at the expense of others..
This is the foundation of Bastiat’s book, and although I may not agree with everything he says, it is not hard to look around some of the developed economies of modern day Europe and see exactly the type of dangers he warned us of. The modern British citizen is taxed on everything they buy, their income and even on the inheritance they leave behind after their passing.
While there is no doubt that the public services afforded by these deductions are generally worthy of praise and respect, it is telling that the dangers foretold by Bastiat come to pass in a more telling way with each passing year.
We do indeed have corporate lobbies who influence government so that laws are passed in their favour, and the realm of politics has been elevated to a station above its value. The law, originally intended to protect the fundamentals of a man’s existence in this world, has been weaponised and used to bludgeon all with a single stroke.
And yet, it is one thing to complain about a system, but what is Bastiat’s alternative?
For a nation to function optimally and with the most amount of freedom acting as the fertile soil for progress, Bastiat proposes that the law (and therefore government) be as minimal as possible, entering into the least of domains and sticking to the passive defence of only the God-given rights to life, liberty and property.
One imagines such a retreat of government from the lives of men today resulting in disarray, chaos and general disorder. But Bastiat addresses this too. Giving the example of a newborn baby whom a local tribe voice their intentions to press its skull and mutilate its body in order to increase its sense of hearing and intelligence, a traveller amongst them forbids them from such actions, advising them that every baby has the God-given ability to grow strong, to hear, see and think as any normal man without the harmful intervention of the tribesmen. So too, Bastiat argues, does man have within himself the ability to grow and develop himself within the vast freedom afforded to him by minimal regulation.
In contrast, the utopian ‘visionary’ who seeks to impose his will on the people by force, compelling them with laws on their wealth, property and thoughts so that his dream of an ideal, prosperous society be reached in fact views man as a blank, worthless slate upon whom greatness must be engraved before he is lost to the ignominy of his desires forever.
Believing in man as a seed which will naturally sprout under ideal conditions into a blossoming tree versus believing that man is a blank slate who must be tamed, reined and whipped towards goodness is an easy choice to make. Although I do not go as far as to believe everything Bastiat says entirely, I find myself in agreement that man generally has boundless potential within him. Some excel in math, others in art, some in religion, others in architecture and economics. Some may not excel in any academic or industrial field at all yet are gifted with the talent of touching the hearts of the people. Whichever the case, I too believe that with the ideal social conditions around them providing safety and freedom from harm for all as a minimum, man will be able to flourish according to his God-given talents. Any top down attempt to force ‘greatness’ upon a society merely results in in the ironic diminishing of the status of the same men intended to be raised.
It is within this context that I now understand better the position of those who voted against the principle that food be a human right. While I may agree with it being a right for everyone to be able to eat in principle, I now understand how burdening a governmental legislation system with this right can be argued to be an overextension of the law, one swaying from its intended original purpose and serving only to increase the load upon an old, decrepit dinosaur. This in fact, is another of Bastiat’s ideas, that one of the unintended sources of plunder in the state are misguided intentions surrounding philanthropy. Some may shed tears over the fate of the less fortunate and seek to resolve their situation by appropriating the wealth of others into a collective fund to help them. In principle I find it hard to believe that anyone would oppose this, yet as it turns out, the definition of those who qualify as those ‘less fortunate’ in society and therefore deserving of aid is vague enough to be abused and therefore turn the face of innocent philanthropy into one of plunder. Should the wealth of the businessman be appropriated and used to support one who by many standards has nothing fundamentally wrong with them? It is a sensitive discussion and one that requires reconciliation between various principles, and that (thankfully) lies outside the scope of this review.
According to the ideas of Bastiat, placing such duties upon the law is not only unreasonable but can be actively detrimental to the social fabric of the state. For the more domains that government is involved in, the larger its surface area to fail or fall short, resulting in people dissatisfied and angry. This anger simmers into discontent, with the long term result being people who either overthrow the system or enter into it to plunder others too for their own gain, thus perpetuating the oppression they once hated.
Again, it is hard to look at many modern economies and not see this happening in front of our eyes.
One of the main things I learnt from this book was the idea of the inherent freedom afforded to the individual by the existence of small government. I understand now what people mean by small government in the first place and how it needn’t be a scary thought to consider. I have broadened my horizons by understanding that it is possible for men to flourish in greater capacity when left to their own devices as much as possible, rather than for them to expect a government to lead and regulate them in every endeavour. I had many of these feelings before, but I was unable to articulate why I believed them to be true. I now have a way of expressing my thoughts.
To conclude, I would recommend this book to others even if they did not agree with its ideas. It is important to learn how people different to you think and interpret the world and by doing so, we are able to balance out some of our own excesses and sharpen our own ideas. ‘The Law’ by Frédéric Bastiat is a wonderfully short read which is nutrient dense and expands one’s mind in a short amount of time. Much food for thought.
The book is written well, articulated eloquently and ideas flow fluently. I recommend it to anyone wishing to understand the reasoning behind those who call for small government or who wish to challenge their ideals in that a government should have its arms in many different domains.