Monday, September 19, 2011

Some Bastiat

The Law By Frederic Bastiat
=============================
Liberals say that man is not free until he is free from want and so the government must guarantee his comforts - everything from housing to health care, cellphones to sustenance. But this notion inherently contradicts itself. For the government to provide for all wants, or even just the important ones - and our leaders know the difference - they must plunder the property of other would-be free Americans. Worse yet, by attaching strings to every giveaway, they plunder the liberty of those on whom they lavish their largess. This notion of freedom destroys freedom. So a better definition must exist.

Freedom is man’s power to exercise his own faculties as he chooses as long as he prohibits no other man from doing the same. Law exists to ensure that no man takes another man’s life - other than in self-defense - or deprives him of his liberty or property. If it is wrong for one man to plunder, then surely it is equally wrong for a group of 20 men to plunder. And if it’s wrong for 20 men to plunder, then it’s equally wrong for 100 million men to plunder - even if they have codified it into law.

“When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”

No comments:

Post a Comment