From "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat: "The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder. With this in mind, examine the protective tariffs, subsidies, guaranteed profits, guaranteed jobs, relief and welfare schemes, public education, progressive taxation, free credit, and public works. You will find that they are always based on legal plunder, organized injustice." But in the end, are these activities really be so bad? Perhaps not for the people on the receiving end. What is your opinion on this? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, in and of themselves they are not bad. It's the potential for abuse that they create which can - and many times does - cause them to become bad.
You have to bear in mind that Bastiat was a believer in natural law. He thought that the law "existed" in a fundamental and objective sense independently from what men said it was. Hence, when he calls something "theft" (or "plunder") he is measuring that by some standard that only he and God know...and the fact that the legislature has approved it and made it legal doesn't matter to him. In fact even he acknowledged that there were subtle shades of difference. For example, he had no problem with the government helping out the "unfortunate" he just wanted it limited. He did not consider the government's giving money to victims of circumstance "theft" and he did not have any good reason to set that case apart other than it feeling (to him...and maybe to God under his crazy view that the law has a form apart from what men say it is) like it was right. He was a strong advocate for limited government, but he based his position on his belief (which he seem to think he'd proved) that government intervention in private business always was worse for consumers (whom he viewed as the proper constituency for governments to care about). This was, though, in an age before, for example, "inspecting food" was plausible. He was, in effect a laissez-faire advocate in an age before the greatest abuses of the laissez faire system became apparent. In the case of this particular quote, the easy counter-argument is that it is not "plunder." It might just be "justice." What it feels like to a given individual will always be subjective. My own view is that it is easy to set up systems of redistribution that are very likely to skew incentives in a way that harms economic efficiency...but economic efficiency is not the only good thing in the world. I am happy having anti-discrimination laws, for example, even though it restricts the right of private businessmen and women to conduct their businesses as they see fit. If their discrimination were inefficient, then for those of them in a competitive industry, they'd go out of business. So why didn't they? The answer is in a society when so many of the majority harbored discriminatory attitudes, it *was* efficient to discriminate. Knowing that black lips never touched the forks in your favorite restaurant, made racist white customers happier with the service over all, and maximizing that happiness (utility) is what economic efficiency is all about. If there had been more whites who eschewed such discrimination, that restaurant *would* have been outcompeted without the law intervening. It's possible that the efficiency of that discrimination was a local maximum, and that a great global maximum waited to be attained once the discriminatory businesses were shut down, but achieving an "even greater" efficiency was not the goal of those laws. Those laws were put in place to achieve "fairness." Bastiat had little time for that belief, because he felt that taking happiness from one person to give it to another was fundamentally *unfair.* There may have been cases where he'd make an exception to that (like, I am sure, where someone derives their pleasure from committing "crimes" with crimes again being a (questionable) "natural law crime" not just any old thing that the legislature has made illegal), but it's a clear implication from what I have read of his works. So, to conflate all the subjectivity, is it "fair" for Bastiat to refer to redistributions as "theft"? I don't personally "feel" that it is "fair." It can be a bad policy choice when the economic losses are not offset by sufficient economic or social gains, but poor policy is not a "crime" and natural law is bunk.
