Frédéric
Bastiat (1801-1850)
What is the proper function of law?
What happens when the law becomes a weapon of those in power, rather than the tool to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals?
Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of
others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?
In other words if the law prohibits an individual from using force to destroy the rights of others, is it not logical that it would also prohibit a group of individuals from the same actions.
If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: the law is the organization of natural rights of lawful defense. It is a substitute of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over all.
Negative v. Positive Conception of Law; Bastiat put forth a negative conception of law
When the law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They safeguard all these… But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force,
impose upon men a regulation of labor, or method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed-then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people.
When a portion of wealth [property] is transferred from the person who owns it — without his consent and without compensation, and whether by force or by fraud — to anyone who does not own it, then I say that property is violated; that an act of plunder
is committed. I say that this act is exactly what the law is supposed to suppress, always and everywhere. When the law itself commits this act that it is supposed to suppress, I say that plunder is still committed…
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Property) do not exist because man made laws. On the contrary, it is a fact that life, liberty, and property existed
beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
It is imprecise to say that law should create justice. In truth, the law should prevent injustice. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.
A free and just society is what results when forcible intervention against individuals does not occur; when they are left
alone.
The purpose of law is the defense of life, liberty, and property. It is the collective organization of the individual right of lawful defense. Each individual has the right to defend his life, liberty, and property. A group of individuals therefore, may be said to have “collective right” to pool their resources to defend themselves. Thus the principle of collective right-its reason for existing, its lawfulness is
based on individual right. And this common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission then that for which it acts as a substitute. If the very purpose of law is the protection of individual rights, then law may not be used — without contradiction — to accomplish what individuals have no right to do. Such a perversion of force would be…contrary to our premise. The result would be on lawful law.
One cannot identify legal plunder by looking for laws that authorize that one person’s property be given to someone else. Such laws should be abolished “without delay.” The person who profits from such laws, defending his acquired rights, his entitlements. Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already
occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else.
