Frédéric Bastiat Quotes

Vote 50 million, more or less, for making ports and roads in Algeria; for sending emigrants there; for building houses and breaking up land. By so doing, you will relieve the French workman, encourage African labor, and give a stimulus to the commerce of Marseilles. It would be profitable every way.” Yes, it is all very true, if you take no account of the fifty million until the moment when the State begins to spend them; if you only see where they go, and not where they come from; if you look only at the good they are to do when they come out of the tax-gatherer’s bag, and not at the harm which has been done, and the good that has been prevented, by putting them into it.

Legal plunder has two roots: one of them, as we have already seen, is in human greed; the other is in misconceived philanthropy.

It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.

What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defence.

historians are always telling us about the class that does not work, never about the class that does; and in this way we come to regard the first of these classes as the entire nation. I cannot help thinking that among the Greeks, among the Romans, among the people of the Middle Ages, men just did what they do now, and were subject to wants so pressing and so constantly recurring, that they were obliged to provide for them under pain of death. Hence I cannot help concluding that such employments then, as at present, formed the principal and absorbing occupation of the great bulk of the human race.

it cannot fail to be admitted, that when protectionism raises the price of things, the consumer loses the difference. But, then, it is said, national labor is the gainer. No, it is not the gainer; for since the Act, it is no more encouraged than it was before, to the amount of fifteen francs. The only thing is that, since the Act, the fifteen francs of John Q. Citizen go to the metal trade, while before it was put in force, they were divided between the ironmonger and the bookseller.

Our adversaries consider, that an activity which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by Government, is an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith is in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not in the legislator.

Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor;
by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources.
This process is the origin of property.
But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants
by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others.
This process is the origin of plunder.

Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. 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. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them. The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. Slavery, restrictions, and monopoly find defenders not only among those who profit from them but also among those who suffer from them.

Whatever God does, is well done; do not pretend to know more than He.

To rob the public, it is necessary to deceive them. To deceive them, it is necessary to persuade them that they are robbed for their own advantage, and to induce them to accept in exchange for their property, imaginary services, and often worse.

The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.

You compare the nation to a parched piece of land and the tax to a life-giving rain. So be it. But you should also ask yourself where this rain comes from, and whether it is not precisely the tax that draws the moisture from the soil and dries it up. You should also ask yourself further whether the soil receives more of this precious water from the rain than it loses by the evaporation?

But yet he may live and enjoy, by seizing and appropriating the productions of the faculties of his fellow men. This is the origin of plunder. Now,