This was an interesting week of reading and lecture videos. I truly enjoyed the assorted works of Frederic Bastiat that we covered. To reflect, I can begin with the topic mentioned in the final lecture video. This is the topic of public education and how Bastiat opposed the idea of required free education. Professor Trost urged us to consider the topic not just from a modern point of view, but from Bastiat’s point of view revolving around what the main function of the law and government should be. It is easy to dismiss Bastiat’s view that such a system of free public education as outdated or wrong based on what we see as a necessity in our country today, but I think those views lead to a very interesting discussion. Bastiat sees the requirement of free or low-cost education for the poor at the expense of the government, and therefore the expense of the public, as a form of legal plunder. More specifically, he calls it false philanthropy, in which individuals are forced to be charitable by having their wealth taken from them and repurposed for these educational goals. Slightly off topic, but this is something my coworker used to discuss with me, although he used the term “forced altruism”. Bastiat believes that true philanthropy would be individuals setting up programs or educating the poor out of their own true charity or goodwill, excluded from the controlling hand of law. On this idea, I must agree with him. There can be no true charity, philanthropy, altruism, or any other term you choose to call it without the key component of personal choice. However, this raises the question of if this perfect scenario would truly arise in the real world. If law did not mandate free or low-cost public education to every citizen, would private organizations or individuals take up the burden of educating the masses of a society or country? Part of me wants to think that yes, in a nation governed by perfectly balanced law as Bastiat describes it, private entities would be free of legal plunder that causes a net negative and would come to see the benefit to themselves and society that educating every citizen possible carries. And that without the burden of legal plunder, they would have the surplus of finances and philanthropic motivation to do so. Yet, there is another, more pessimistic part of me, that doesn’t believe humans altruistic enough to be motivated to do so, even under ideal conditions. If this is the case however, then altruism or philanthropy would not exist at all. For false philanthropy as Bastiat describes it is not true philanthropy, and my latter misanthropic view describes a world without true philanthropy present. But luckily for my sanity, even selfish motivations under the ideal conditions of law and government described by Bastiat would most likely have individuals or organizations with the financial means to educate masses do so. I think that those with great economic surplus generated by their efforts would see the potential benefits to themselves and their companies of having an educated workforce available to them. Let us assume that both parts of me are right to some extent, if half of people with the resources available were motivated by true philanthropy to educate the poor, and the other half were at least motivated by self-serving desires, then it seems to me that the task would still be accomplished.
Government
I’m realizing now that my reflection on that prompt was much longer winded than I had anticipated, so let’s get into some other views that I found interesting in Bastiat’s writings. I was initially struck by Bastiat’s description of the conflicting interests of government. His account of the back-and-forth battle between the strategies of no tax with no benefits and high tax with many benefits was so simple yet it felt like I was understanding the cycle of our own politics in a new way for the first time. Government with such conflicting interests is doomed to fail. A society that expects the government to have a gentle hand that gives us much while the rough hand takes little sets these conflicting expectations.
Legal Plunder and Microfinance
Another topic that stood out to me was when Bastiat brought up how people who endorse socialist policies expect the government to be the regulator of credit. I thought this misconception tied nicely with the story from the first week about the microfinance company. You cannot expect the government, a nonprofit organization, to provide credit to the poor (even if this is basically what is done in legal plunder). There is no access to commercial lines of credit and so the operation cannot scale to reach everyone necessary. The only way to grow such an operation is to provide an incentive to those supplying the capital by operating on a for-profit basis. A system providing microfinance to the poor that cannot support itself and grow, is a leech. And what is the leech stealing from? Individuals who cannot demand their resources because of the perversion of the law. This is a primary example of what Bastiat calls legal plunder.
