Frédéric Bastiat Quotes

Hacer reinar la justicia está tan en la naturaleza de la ley, que ley y justicia, es todo uno en el espíritu de la gente. Todos tenemos una fuerte inclinación a considerar lo legal como legítimo, hasta tal punto que son muchos los que falsamente dan por sentado que toda justicia emana de la ley. Basta pues que la ley ordene y consagre la expoliación, para que ésta parezca justa y sagrada para muchas conciencias. La esclavitud, la restricción, el monopolio, encuentran defensores no solamente entre los que de ello aprovechan, sino aún entre los que por ello sufren.

It is in the nature of men to rise against the injustice of which they are the victims. When, therefore, plunder is organized by law, for the profit of those who perpetrate it, all the plundered classes tend, either by peaceful or revolutionary means, to enter in some way into the manufacturing of laws. These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment of their political rights; either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it.

Woe to the nation where this latter thought prevails amongst the masses, at the moment when they, in their turn, seize upon the legislative power!

Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

The mission of law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even thought the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect property.

¡Ley pervertida! ¡Ley — y con ella, todas las fuerzas colectivas de la Nación — desviada de su objetivo legítimo y dirigida a un objetivo totalmente contrario! ¡Ley convertida en instrumento de todas las codicias, en lugar de frenar las codicias! ¡Ley hacedora de iniquidad, cuando su misión era castigar la iniquidad!

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable. When the law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law — two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same.

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

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.

because we desire to see those activities, on the one hand free, and on the other seeking their own reward in themselves. Thus, if we think that the State should not interfere by subsidies in religious affairs, we are atheists. If we think the State ought not to interfere by subsidies in education, we are hostile to knowledge. If we say that the State ought not by subsidies to give a fictitious value to land, or to any particular branch of industry, we are enemies to property and labor. If we think that the State ought not to support artists, we are barbarians, who look upon the arts as useless.

The profit of the one is the profit of the other.

The Superman Idea The claims of these organizers of humanity raise another question which I have often asked them and which, so far as I know, they have never answered: 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?

Just as in money we see the sign of wealth, we see also in paper money the sign of money; and thence conclude that there is a very easy and simple method of procuring for everybody the pleasures of fortune.

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. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.

Le plus pressé, ce n'est pas que l'État enseigne, mais qu'il laisse enseigner. Tous les monopoles sont détestables, mais le pire de tous, c'est le monopole de l'enseignement.

Once false money (under whatever form it may take) is put into circulation, depreciation will ensue, and manifest itself by the universal rise of everything that is capable of being sold. But this rise in prices is not instantaneous and equal for all things.