They need only to give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series, their socialized projects, their free- credit banks, their … - Frédéric Bastiat

They need only to give up the idea of forcing us to acquiesce to their groups and series, their socialized projects, their free- credit banks, their Graeco-Roman concept of morality, and their commercial regulations. I ask

Man recoils from trouble — from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose then between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the enjoyment from assuming their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the enjoyment that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be — whether that of wars, taxes, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. — monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought that has given them birth. Oppression should be detested and resisted — it can hardly be called trivial.

As long as these ideas prevail, it is clear that the responsibility of government is enormous. Good fortune and bad fortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality, virtue and vice – all then depend upon political administration.

The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.