The Law

The Law is an 1850 book by Frédéric Bastiat. It was written at Mugron two years after the third French Revolution and a few months before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous, followed by the candlemaker's petition and the parable of the broken window. Overview In The Law, Bastiat wrote that "each of us has a natural right – from God – to defend his person, his liberty, and his property." He described the State as a "substitution of a common force for individual forces" to defend this right. He contended that law becomes perverted when it is used to violate the rights of the individual, when it punishes one's right to defend himself against an effort of others to legislatively enact laws which plunder his wealth/property. Bastiat asserted that whereas justice has precise limits, philanthropy is limitless and thus government can grow endlessly when that becomes its function. The resulting statism, he argued, is "based on this triple hypothesis: the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator." The relationship between the public and the legislator becomes "like the clay to the potter." Bastiat stated, "I do not dispute their right to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose these plans upon us by law – by force – and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes." Content Bastiat argues in the work that a government consists only of the people within or authorizing it, therefore it has no legitimate powers beyond those that people would individually have: