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:
He goes on to describe the rights that those individuals do have, which he recognizes as natural rights, based on natural law. He summarizes these as life, liberty, and private property, explaining that government's only legitimate role is to protect them:
Therefore, government is simply an extension of these specific natural rights to a collective force, and its main purpose is the protection of these rights. Any government that oversteps beyond this role, acting in ways that an individual would not have the right to act, places itself at war with its own purpose:
Bastiat thus also points out that those who resist plunder, as is their natural right, become targets of the very law that was supposed to protect their rights in the first place. Laws are passed saying that opposing plunder is illegal, with punishments that will accumulate to death, if resisted consistently.
Though living in France, Bastiat wrote this book when slavery was still legal in the United States and was very controversial there, as it was in Europe. In the U.S. at that time, there was a dramatic struggle between the agricultural southern states and the industrialized northern. Globally famous were the two key components of this, with the northern states imposing crippling tariffs that impoverished the South while trying to ban slavery. Bastiat pointedly describes both slavery and tariffs as forms of "legal plunder".
What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.
Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.}}
Bastiat goes on to describe other forms of plunder, both legalized by the state and banned. He then concludes that the problem of it must be settled once and for all. He says that there are three ways to do so:
- The few plunder the many.
- Everybody plunders everybody.
- Nobody plunders anyone.
He points out that, given these options, what is obviously the best for society is the last one, with all plunder being ended. But, that being an ideal, he advocates for a return to the first. Bastiat argues that universal suffrage expanded the number of political blocs vying for control of the state and, therefore, expanded plunder. Because he conceptualizes the state as a force of domination necessary to counteract human nature, he says the state should be limited to only that purpose instead of trying to provide philanthropic services, as those services are liable to expand into oppressive systems.