08 - The Law - Frederic Bastiat

Section 8 One of the strangest phenomena of our time and one that will probably be a matter

of astonishment to our descendants is the doctrine which is founded upon this triple hypothesis,

the radical passiveness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, the infallibility of the legislator.

This is the sacred symbol of the party that proclaims itself exclusively democratic.

It is true that it professes also to be social, so far as it is democratic, it has an unlimited

faith in mankind. So far as it is social, it places mankind beneath the mud. Our political rights

under discussion is a legislator to be chosen. Oh, then the people possess science by instinct.

They are gifted with an admirable discernment. Their will is always right. The general will cannot

or suffrage cannot be too universal. Nobody is under any responsibility to society. The will and

the capacity to choose well are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in

an age of enlightenment? What are the people to be forever led about by the nose? Have they not

acquired their rights at the cost of effort and sacrifice? Have they not given sufficient

proof of intelligence and wisdom? Are they not arrived at maturity? Are they not in a state

to judge for themselves? Do they not know their own interest? Is there a man or a class who would

dare to claim the right of putting himself in the place of the people of deciding and evading for

them? No, no. The people would be free and they shall be so. They wish to conduct their own

affairs and they shall do so. But when once the legislator is duly elected, then indeed the

style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness, nothingness,

and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It is for him to invent, for him to direct,

for him to impel, for him to organize. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit. The hour of

despotism has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive for the people just before so enlightened,

so moral, so perfect, have no inclinations at all, or if they have any, these all lead them downwards

towards degradation. And yet they ought to have a little liberty, but are we not assured by Mr.

Considerant that liberty leads fatally to monopoly? Are we not told that liberty is competition

and that competition according to Mr. Louis Blanc is a system of extermination for the people

and of ruination for trade? For that reason, people are exterminated and ruined in proportion as

they are free. Take for example Switzerland, Holland, England and the United States.

Does not Mr. Louis Blanc tell us again that competition leads to monopoly? And that for the same

reason, cheapness leads to exorbitant prices? That competition tends to drain the sources of

consumption and diverts production to a destructive activity. That competition forces production to

increase and consumption to decrease when it follows that free people produce for the sake of not

consuming, that there is nothing but oppression and madness among them and that it is absolutely

necessary for Mr. Louis Blanc to see to it. What sort of liberty should be allowed to men,

liberty of conscience? But we should see them all profiting by the permission to become atheists,

liberty of education, but parents would be paying professors to teach their sons immorality

and error. Besides, if we are to believe Mr. Thiers, education if left to the national liberty

would cease to be national and we should be educating our children in the ideas of the Turks

or the Hindus, instead of which, thanks to the legal despotism of the universities,

they have the good fortune to be educated in the noble ideas of the Romans. Liberty of labor?

But this is only competition whose effect is to leave all products unconsumed to exterminate the

people and to ruin the tradesmen. The liberty of exchange? Ah, but it is well known that the

protectionists have shown over and over again that a man will inevitably be ruined when he exchanges

freely and that to become rich it is necessary to exchange without liberty. Liberty of association,

but according to the socialist doctrine, liberty and association exclude each other for the liberty

of men is attacked just to force them to associate. You must see then that the socialist

Democrats cannot in conscience allow men any liberty because by their own nature they tend in

every instance to all kinds of degradation and demoralization. We are therefore left to conjecture

in this case upon what foundation at universal suffrage is claimed for them with so much

importunity. The pretensions of organizers suggest another question which I have often asked

them and to which I am not aware that I ever received an answer. Since the natural tendencies

of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the

tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not legislatures and their agents form a part of the

human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind?

They say that society, when levered to itself, rushes to inevitable destruction because its instincts

are perverse. They presume to stop it in its downward course and to give it a better direction.

They have therefore received from heaven intelligence and virtues that place them beyond and above

mankind. Let them show their title to this superiority. They would be our shepherds and we are to be

their flock. This arrangement presupposes in them a natural superiority, the right to which we

are fully justified in calling upon them to prove. You must observe that I am not contending against

their right to invent social combinations, to propagate them, to recommend them, and to try them

upon themselves at their own expense and risk. But I do dispute their right to impose them upon us

through the medium of the law, that is, by force and by public taxes. I would not insist upon the

cabitists, the forriariists, the prudonians, the academics, and the protectionists renouncing their

own particular ideas. I would only have them renounce the idea that is common to them all,

these that are subjecting us by force to their own categories and rankings, to their social

laboratories, to their ever inflating bank, to their Greco-Roman morality, and to their commercial

restrictions. I would ask them to allow us the faculty of judging over their plans and not to

oblige us to adopt them if we find that they hurt our interests or our repugnant to our consciences.

To presume to have recourse to power and taxation, besides being oppressive and unjust,

implies further the pernicious assumption that the organized is infallible and mankind incompetent.

And if mankind is not competent to judge for itself, why do they talk so much about universal

suffrage? This contradiction in ideas is unhappily to be found also in facts, and who else the

French nation has preceded all others in obtaining its rights, or rather its political claims.

This has by no means prevented it from being more governed, and directed, and imposed upon,

and fettered, and cheated, than any other nation. It is also the one of all others,

where revolutions are constantly to be dreaded, and it is perfectly natural that it should be so.

So long as this idea is retained, which is admitted by all our politicians, and so energetically

expressed by Monsieur Louis Blanc in these words, society receives its impulse from power.

So long as men consider themselves as capable of feeling, yet passive,

incapable of raising themselves by their own discernment, and by their own energy to any

morality, or well-being, and while they expect everything from the law. In a word,

while they admit that their relations with the state are the same as those of the flock with

the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of power is immense. Fortune and misfortune,

wealth and destitution, equality and inequality all proceed from it. It is charged with everything,

it undertakes everything. It does everything. Therefore, it has to answer for everything.

If we are happy, it has a right to claim our gratitude, but if we are miserable, it alone must

bear the blame. Are not our persons and property in fact at its disposal? Is not the law omnipotent?

In creating the educational monopoly, it is undertaken to answer the expectations of fathers of

families who have been deprived of liberty, and if these expectations are disappointed, whose fault

is it? In regulating industry, it has undertaken to make it prosper, otherwise it would have been

absurd to deprive it of its liberty, and if it suffers whose fault is it? In pretending to adjust

the balance of commerce by the game of tariffs, it undertakes to make commerce prosper,

and if so far from prospering, it is destroyed, whose fault is it? In granting its protection

to maritime armaments in exchange for their liberty, it is undertaken to render them self-sufficient,

if they become burdensome, whose fault is it? Thus, there is not a grievance in the nation,

for which the government does not voluntarily make itself responsible. Is it any wonder that every

failure threatens to cause a revolution? And what is the remedy proposed? To extend indefinitely

the dominion of the law, i.e. the responsibility of government. But if the government undertakes to

raise and to regulate wages and is not able to do it, if it undertakes to assist all those who

are in want and is not able to do it, if it undertakes to provide work for every labor and is not

able to do it, if it undertakes to offer to all who wish to borrow easy credit and is not able to do it,

if in words that we regret should have escaped the pin of Monsieur de la Martine, quote,

the state considers that its mission is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen,

to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people, and quote, if it fails in this,

is it not obvious that after every disappointment, which alas is more than probable,

there will be a no less inevitable revolution,

end of section 8.