To the Editor:
A brilliant mind we can all learn from in these days of government bailouts, and a debt that is probably larger than any economy can support is Frédéric Bastiat’s. He was born in Bayonne, France, in 1801. It is said he came of age during the Napoleonic Wars, when there was extensive government intervention in economic affairs.
In his famous book, “La Loi” (“The Law”), published when he was 39 years old, Bastiat states that each of us has a natural right from God to defend his person, his liberty and his property. The state is a substitution of a common force for individual forces to defend this right. The law becomes perverted when it punishes one’s right to self defense in favor of another’s right to plunder.
Bastiat defines two forms of plunder: stupid greed and false philanthropy. Stupid greed is protective tariffs, subsidies and guaranteed profits, and false philanthropy is guaranteed jobs, relief, welfare schemes, progressive taxation, free credit and public works. Justice has precise limits, but philanthropy is limitless and government can grow endlessly when that becomes its function.
He must have been looking over my shoulder when I had occasion to visit a New York hospital and posted on their bulletin board was a notice concerning patients’ rights and services. If you needed an interpreter for any of the following 17 languages, one would be provided to you free of charge. Seventeen languages – from Albanian to Urdu. Sad, but true. Free to those who don’t pay taxes, but an albatross to those who do.
He said, “I do not dispute government’s 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 by law, by force and to compel us to pay for them with our taxes. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Are we truly free, or a ward of the government, which taxes us into eternity and our children’s children to pay for all their mistakes and endless, needless programs that we have no money to pay for?
THOMAS J. BRAGEN