The Law's True Purpose: Justice or Plunder?
A Commentary on Frederic Bastiat's "The Law"
Plunder is described in “The Law” by Frederic Bastiat as “seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others.” In some cases, this plunder is actually organized by those who make the law. Bastiat goes so far as to say that “sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it.” This is called legal plunder, which quite literally turns victims of theft into criminals should they defend themselves. It’s important for citizens to remember that nothing enters into the public treasury that another citizen wasn’t first forced to send. This completely betrays the actual mission of the law, which is to protect the products of the labor of citizens - most certainly not to seize and consume them.
Bastiat carefully describes illegal plunder as “swindling” and does not consider it as big a threat to society as legal plunder because there are already punishments in place for such violations. The bigger threat to society is when judges, police, and prisons all take part in stealing from citizens. Not only through a corrupt justice system but also through tariffs, benefits, and subsidies. Bastiat says one way to identify legal plunder is anytime one citizen benefits at the expense of another. He goes on to proclaim that “protectionism, socialism, and communism are basically the same plant in three different stages of its growth.” He warns that the only way to settle the question of legal plunder is to embrace the principles of justice, peace, and order which allow for neither illegal nor legal plunder under any circumstances.
When the law is used to legally steal from each other, then it should come as no surprise when more people want to join the business of making such laws. Your average citizen will say “we also would like to use the law for our own profit.” The very distinction between justice and injustice will become blurred. There is a reason that the two biggest moral issues that have always plagued the United States are slavery and tariffs - both are egregious violations of law and liberty. If left unchecked, legal plunder will ultimately send us down the path of socialism, slowly destroying justice with every step. Rather than using the law to plunder each other, we must remember that for every man to be truly free he must fully own his faculties to include the products of his own labor, not to be taken by any other man or government.
