Over the past semester, I very strongly believe that my opinions and stances on a lot of subjects have been expanded. I've learned a lot of new perspectives that have contributed to my new understanding of a huge variety of subjects. I am going to look back at my original opinions on Bastiat's perspective on the roll of government and their primary prerogatives and compare them to my feelings now.
In my reflection paper from the beginning of the semester, I focused primarily on what classifies as plunder and what types of plunder I considered to be necessary. I addressed Bastiat's definition of plunder which is "the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong" and gave examples of what I believed to be valid tax plunder. Some of those included construction, public schooling, and national defense. This aspect of my reflection paper, I still stand with, but that's not my primary focus anymore.
I don't believe that Bastiat was focused on things like taxation as much as I originally thought he was. I now believe that he was more so trying to explain the line between coercion and cooperation that Dr. Davies also explained to us. Bastiat was abundantly concerned about individuals earning and maintaining what was rightfully theirs. He believed that plunder was a huge issue and contributed to a number of other issues as well. While listening to Dr. Davies lecture, I found a very similar desire. Dr. Davies is preaching about finding a balance between coercion and cooperation. The founding principles being that coercion is only acceptable when used to PROTECT citizens, but allow them to make their own decisions. The example of traffic laws is a great example of this. The laws (coercion) are implemented for the safety of the population, but cooperation of the individuals allows them to still make the decision as to whether or not they follow the regulation.
I liked Dr. Davies presentation of developing this line between the two. To my understanding, I believe this line to be that coercion can intervene for the safety of the general population, but only to the point of protecting them and not taking from anyone else to do so. Stepping back to traffic laws, they are ultimately not taking from anyone in order to protect the population and therefore are within the bounds of how far coercion is able to go.
