 The Law by Frederick Bastiat, probably the book, very thin book, some call it an essay, which changed the way I see the world more than any other. It was the first thing I read, the first arguments that I heard that describe the law, not as the thing that protects me, as I had been taught since kindergarten, but as the biggest criminal among us. I want to read a few excerpts and I want to dedicate it to those among the Occupy Wall Street protesters who believe a lack of laws were our problem, and a greater abundance of laws or a stricter enforcement of laws are the solution to our economic problems. The law is perverted, the law and in its wake all the collective forces of the nation, the law I say not only diverted from its proper direction but made to pursue one entirely contrary, the law become the tool of every kind of avarice instead of being its check. The law has been perverted through the influence of two very different causes, naked greed and misconceived philanthropy. Let us speak of the former, self-preservation and development is the common aspiration of all men, in such a way that if everyone enjoyed the free exercise of his faculties and the free disposition of their fruits, social progress would be incessant, uninterrupted, inevitable. But there is also another disposition which is common to them, this is to live and to develop when they can at the expense of one another. This is no rash imputation emanating from a gloomy, uncharitable spirit, history bears witness to the truth of it. Now labor, being in itself a pain and man being naturally inclined to avoid pain, it follows and history proves it that whenever plunder is less burdensome than labor, it prevails and neither religion nor morality can in this case prevent it from prevailing. When does plunder cease then? When it becomes more burdensome and more dangerous than labor? It is very evident that the proper aim of the law is to oppose the fatal tendency to plunder with the powerful obstacle of collective force. That phrase and several others are what make Bastiat a minarchist. And I, after reading this and thinking I became a minarchist too and held on to those arguments for quite a long time before I was, after being put to task by some friends, I became a complete volunteerist. Um, the powerful obstacle of collective force. That all its measure should be in phrase in favor of property and against plunder. But the law is made generally by one man or by one class of men and the law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderant force. It must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate. Bastiat critiques many philosophers of his day and some of his predecessors including Rousseau as great supporters of the tyranny of law. And then he specifically addresses socialism. Socialism like the old policy from which it emanates confounds government and society. And so every time we object to a thing being done by government, it concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the state, then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion, then we would have no religion at all. We object to an any to any quality which is brought about by the state. Then we are against education altogether. We object to a state religion, then we would have no religion at all. To any quality which is brought about by the state, then we are against equality, etc, etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men do not eat because we object to the cultivation of corn by the state. How is it that the strange idea of making the law produce what it does not contain prosperity in a positive sense? Wealth, science, religion should have ever gained ground in the political world. The modern politicians, particularly those of the socialist school, found their different theories upon one hypothesis and surely a more strange, more preposterous notion could never have entered a human brain. They divide mankind into two parts, men in general, except for one, form the first part. The politician himself forms the second, which is by far the most important. In fact, they begin by supposing that men are devoid of any principle of action, of any means of discernment in themselves, that they have no initiative, that they are inert matter, passive particles, atoms without impulses, at best a vegetation indifferent to its own mode of existence, susceptible of assuming from an exterior will and hand an infinite number of forms, more or less symmetrical, artistic and perfected. Starting from these data, as a gardener, according to his capris, shapes his trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, cones, vases or fans, so the socialist, following his chimera, shapes poor humanity into groups, series, circles, sub-series, honeycombs or social workshops, with all kinds of variations. And as the gardener, to bring his trees into shape, needs hatchets, pruning hooks, saws and shears, so the politician to bring society into shape needs the forces which he can only find in the laws, the law of tariffs, the law of taxation, the law of assistance, the law of education. It is so true that the socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments. These gentlemen, the reformers, legislatures and politicians, do not desire to exercise an immediate despotism over mankind. No, they are too moderate and too philanthropic for that. They only contend for the despotism, the absolutism, the omnipotence of the law. They aspire only to make the law. The law is justice, he's talking about now the proper function of the law. The law is justice, nothing can be more clear and simple, more perfectly defined and abounded or more visible to every eye. Depart from this point, make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, industrial, literary or artistic, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty. You will be upon unknown ground in a forced utopia, or what is worse, in the midst of a multitude of contending utopias, each striving to gain possession of the law and to impose it upon you for fraternity and philanthropy have no fixed limits as justice has. Where will it stop? He ends with an anecdote. A celebrated traveler found himself in the midst of a savage tribe, a child had just been born and a crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks were around it, armed with rings, hooks, and bandages. One said, this child will never smell the perfume of a calamnae unless I stretch his nostrils. Another said, he will be without the sense of hearing unless I draw his ears down to his shoulders. A third said, he will never see the light of the sun unless I give his eyes an oblique direction. A fourth said, he will never be upright unless I bend his legs. A fifth said, he will not be able to think unless I press his brain. Stop, said the traveler, whatever God does is well done. Do not pretend to know more than he. As he has given organs to this frail creature, allow those organs to develop themselves, to strengthen themselves by exercise, use, experience, and liberty. God has implanted in mankind all that is necessary to enable to accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology as well as a providential human physiology. The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away then with quacks and organizers, away with their rings and their chains and their hooks and their pincers, away with their artificial methods, away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their state religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation. And now after having vainly inflicted upon the social body of so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun. Reject all systems and try liberty, liberty which is an act of faith in God and His works. Try liberty.