Added
to this Library with permission from the Foundation
for Economic Education
Introduction
by
Walter E. Williams 1
I
must have been forty years old before reading Frederic Bastiat's
classic The Law. An anonymous person, to whom I shall eternally
be in debt, mailed me an unsolicited copy. After reading the book
I was convinced that a liberal-arts education without an encounter
with Bastiat is incomplete. Reading Bastiat made me keenly aware
of all the time wasted, along with the frustrations of going down
one blind alley after another, organizing my philosophy of life.
The Law did not produce a philosophical conversion for
me as much as it created order in my thinking about liberty and
just human conduct.
Many
philosophers have made important contributions to the discourse
on liberty, Bastiat among them. But Bastiat's greatest contribution
is that he took the discourse out of the ivory tower and made
ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlettered can understand
them and statists cannot obfuscate them. Clarity is crucial to
persuading our fellowman of the moral superiority of personal
liberty.
Like
others, Bastiat recognized the greatest single threat to liberty
is government. Notice the clarity he employs to help us identify
and understand evil government acts such as legalized plunder.
Bastiat says, "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." With such an accurate description of legalized plunder,
we cannot deny the conclusion that most government activities,
including ours, are legalized plunder, or for the sake of modernity,
legalized theft.
Frederic
Bastiat could have easily been a fellow traveler of the signers
of our Declaration of Independence. The signers' vision of liberty
and the proper role of government was captured in the immortal
words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain Unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments
are instituted among Men...." Bastiat echoes the identical vision,
saying, "Life, faculties, productionin other words individuality,
liberty, propertythat 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." Bastiat gave the
same rationale for government as did our Founders, saying, "Life,
liberty and property do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it is the fact that life, liberty and property
existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place."
No finer statements of natural or God-given rights have been made
than those found in our Declaration of Independence and The
Law.
Bastiat
pinned his hopes for liberty on the United States saying, "...look
at the United States. There is no country in the world where the
law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every
person's liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there
appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests
on a firmer foundation." Writing in 1850, Bastiat noted two areas
where the United States fell short: "Slavery is a violation, by
law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law,
of property."
If
Bastiat were alive today, he would be disappointed with our failure
to keep the law within its proper domain. Over the course of a
century and a half, we have created more than 50,000 laws. Most
of them permit the state to initiate violence against those who
have not initiated violence against others. These laws range from
anti-smoking laws for private establishments and Social Security
"contributions" to licensure laws and minimum wage laws. In each
case, the person who resolutely demands and defends his God-given
right to be left alone can ultimately suffer death at the hands
of our government. 2
Bastiat
explains the call for laws that restrict peaceable, voluntary
exchange and punish the desire to be left alone by saying that
socialists want to play God. Socialists look upon people as raw
material to be formed into social combinations. To themthe
elite"the relationship between persons and the legislator
appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and
the potter." And for people who have this vision, Bastiat displays
the only anger I find in The Law when he lashes out at
do-gooders and would-be rulers of mankind, "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."
Bastiat
was an optimist who thought that eloquent arguments in defense
of liberty might save the day; but history is not on his side.
Mankind's history is one of systematic, arbitrary abuse and control
by the elite acting privately, through the church, but mostly
through government. It is a tragic history where hundreds of millions
of unfortunate souls have been slaughtered, mostly by their own
government. A historian writing 200 or 300 years from now might
view the liberties that existed for a tiny portion of mankind's
population, mostly in the western world, for only a tiny portion
of its history, the last century or two, as a historical curiosity
that defies explanation. That historian might also observe that
the curiosity was only a temporary phenomenon and mankind reverted
back to the traditional state of affairsarbitrary control
and abuse.
Hopefully,
history will prove that pessimistic assessment false. The worldwide
collapse of the respectability of the ideas of socialism and communism
suggests that there is a glimmer of hope. Another hopeful sign
is the technological innovations that make it more difficult for
government to gain information on and control its citizens. Innovations
such as information access, communication and electronic monetary
transactions will make government attempts at control more costly
and less probable. These technological innovations will increasingly
make it possible for world citizens to communicate and exchange
with one another without government knowledge, sanction or permission.
Collapse
of communism, technological innovations, accompanied by robust
free-market organizations promoting Bastiat's ideas, are the most
optimistic things I can say about the future of liberty in the
United States. Americans share an awesome burden and moral responsibility.
If liberty dies in the United States, it is destined to die everywhere.
A greater familiarity with Bastiat's clear ideas about liberty
would be an important step in rekindling respect and love, and
allowing the resuscitation of the spirit of liberty among our
fellow Americans.
- Walter
E. Williams, John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics
and Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University,
Fairfax, Virginia.
- Death
is not the stated penalty for disobedience; however, death can
occur if the person refuses to submit to government sanctions
for his disobedience.
.......
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