Frederic Bastiat
Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism - including, of course, legal despotism?Collection: Legal
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.Collection: Great
And what is liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties - liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, or labor, or trade?Collection: Travel
In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so?Collection: Freedom
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.Collection: Men
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone.
Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.
Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice?
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.Collection: Political
When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.Collection: Life
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?Collection: Believe
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.Collection: Law
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all . . . . It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grainCollection: Spring
The real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.Collection: Jobs
The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.Collection: States
When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.Collection: Law
It's always tempting to do good at someone else's expenseCollection: Expenses
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.Collection: Law
Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat: these two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other.Collection: Self
Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.Collection: Thinking
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.Collection: Evil
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.Collection: Mean
If philanthropy is not voluntary, it destroys liberty and justice. The law can give nothing that has not first been taken from its owner.Collection: Taken
The law has been perverted, and the powers of the state have become perverted along with it. The law has not only been turned from its proper function, but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose. The law has become a tool for every kind of greed. Instead of preventing crime, the law itself is guilty of the abuses it is supposed to punish. If this is true, it is a serious matter, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.Collection: Law
We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.Collection: Liberty
Taking Five and Returning Four is not GivingCollection: Giving
There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation.Collection: Thinking
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.Collection: Mean
Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.Collection: Names
People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.Collection: Fall
The plans differ; the planners are all alike.Collection: Liberty
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?Collection: Rights
Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.Collection: Law
Who then would not like to see these benefits flow upon the world from the law, as from an inexhaustible source? But is it possible? Whence does the State draw those resources that it is urged to dispense by way of benefits to individuals? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How, then, can these resources be increased by passing through the hands of a parasitic and voracious intermediary?Collection: Philosophy
The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.Collection: Independent
Trade protection accumulates upon a single point the good which it effects, while the evil inflicted is infused throughout the mass. The one strikes the eye at a first glance, while the other becomes perceptible only to close investigation.Collection: Eye
The law commit legal plunder by violating liberty and property.Collection: Law
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.Collection: Encouragement
Life, faculties, production-in other words, individuality, liberty, property-this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.Collection: Men
The balance of trade is an article of faith.Collection: Balance
But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity, not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence.Collection: Responsibility
It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.Collection: Law
The impulses of my heart are the voice of Nature, which is never mistaken. The institutions that stand in my way are man-made and are only arbitrary conventions to which I have never given my consent. In trampling these institutions underfoot, I shall have the double pleasure of satisfying my inclinations and of believing myself a heroCollection: Believe
We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles.Collection: Ignorance
Repetition may not entertain, but it teaches.Collection: Motivational
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.Collection: Law