Source - Frederic Bastiat Wikipedia
Within The Law, many compelling arguments against socialism and in favor of capitalism are made. Frédéric Bastiat focuses on the purpose of law being to protect individuals’ rights, specifically their God given rights to defend “his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;” and how law can be perverted to no longer accomplish this chief objective. Bastiat makes the connection that because it is reprehensible for us as individuals to deprive other individuals of these rights, that governing bodies should not be permitted to do so by force of law. I really appreciate that Bastiat puts such an emphasis on the importance of law being to protect a persons physical body, their liberties, and their properties. Bastiat also heavily focuses on the idea of plundering, and how it relates to the law and his arguments against a socialist economic system. Plunder is the unjustified and unwanted stripping of property from a person, and I feel that understanding Bastiats position on the forms of plundering is imperative to understanding The Laws arguments against a socialist economic system.
To begin with, Bastiats assertion that the core mandate of law is to protect the natural life that all humans are endowed with, and the natural rights that come with this life, is key to understanding the point Bastiat is trying to make. For the law to overstep and do more than protect these natural rights is for the law to begin to encroach upon being a perversion of a just law. A socialist economic system is a perversion of the law because it is a way for the government to engage in “legal plunder” of an individual persons assets, directly going against what Bastiat argues is the core purpose of a law. The liberty and property of those under a socialist economic state are no longer safe under protection from the law, and are rather in danger from the law itself. I feel Bastiats arguments that people are the happiest, most moral, and most peaceable when their government is the least felt, interferes the least with private activity, where the minimum is done simply in the interest of preserving the aforementioned core mandates of law, is especially true. However, I do feel this is a section of The Law in which the age of the text shows, as in a modern economy a measured dose of government intervention is necessary in order to foster a level of general economic fairness.
I feel that it is important to acknowledge that Bastiats arguments do not prove that a capitalist system is the perfect system, merely that it is a less perverted system than a socialist economy. Capitalist economies are more free from the legal plunder that Bastiat references, and is the system which is closest to fostering a world where nobody plunders anybody, legally or illegally. Bastiat acknowledges that a core flaw of the socialist theory lies in the fact that law can’t “organize labor, instruction, and religion, without disorganizing justice.” This is plainly true, because the law is no longer being used in a defensive manner to protect the rights of the governed, and it is rather exerting force upon them in order to forcibly refashion the person, liberty, and property it should be defending into what the governing body deems as acceptable.
However, I believe that at times Bastiat is overzealous in his pursuit of the absence of plunder. For the majority of The Law, Bastiat argues unequivocally that taxation is a form of legal plunder and unjust. On this point, I must disagree though in a limited manner. Taxation is necessary to foster a strong government that is capable of acting in the interest of its constituents, for a number of reasons. First, because it pays for development of infrastructure and funds a strong police and military force capable of exerting force to uphold the law and protect the citizens from outside forces. Second, because without payment there would be no true incentive for someone to work in government other than the temptation to pervert the law so that they may partake in legal plundering. It is true that the money taken from us by taxes placed upon the things we purchase is a form of legal plunder, but as far as I can tell it is a necessary form of legal plunder. As Bastiat argues in The Law, it is within human nature to do the least amount of labor possible because labor is pain, so with no economic incentive to endure the labor that comes with being a public servant who’s salary is paid for by taxes, then by Bastiats own reasoning there would be no reason for anyone to work in the government and uphold the core mandate of law.
