Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Law

The Law

Bastiat, Frederic

Paperback

PhilosophyGeneral LawGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 1938357256
ISBN13: 9781938357251
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Jul 7 2015
Pages: 58
Weight: 0.15
Height: 0.12 Width: 5.24 Depth: 7.99
Language: English
The Law was originally published in French in 1850 (this translation to English is from 1874) by Frédéric Bastiat. It was written two years after the third French Revolution of 1848 and a few months before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous. Bastiat states that each of us has a natural right - from God - to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. The State is a substitution of a common force for individual forces to defend this right. The law becomes perverted when it punishes one's right to self-defense in favor of another's acquired right to plunder. He defines two forms of plunder: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Stupid greed is protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits and false philanthropy is guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works. Monopolism and Socialism are legalized plunder which Bastiat emphasizes is legal but not legitimate. Justice has precise limits but philanthropy is limitless and government can grow endlessly when that becomes its function. The resulting statism is based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator. The relationship between the public and the legislator becomes like the clay to the potter. Bastiat says, I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law-by force-and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes.

33 different editions

Also available

Also in

General Political Science

View All