Life Is a Gift from God

Life cannot maintain itself alone.

Three gifts from God precede all human legislation - individuality, liberty, property.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.

Men make laws to protect life, liberty, and property.

What Is Law?

Law is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.

These are the three basic requirements of life are mutually interdependent.

The principle of collective rights is based on individual rights.

Collective force can logically only protect individual rights.

Collective forces will arise spontaneously to protect individual rights.

Collective force cannot lawfully be used to take life, liberty or property.

Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights.

Just law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense.

A Just and Enduring Government

Under a just administration each and everyone possesses the the fruits of his own labor.

In the non-intervention of the state in private affairs, satisfactions develop in a natural manner without displacements of capital, labor and population caused by legislative decisions.

State-created displacements burden the government with increased responsibilities.

The Complete Perversion of the Law

Law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others.

It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder.

And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.

A Fatal Tendency of Mankind

Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among people.

Predators, when they can, wish to live and prosper at the expense of others.

This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.

Property and Plunder

Man may live through the application of his labor to natural resources or man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others.

Plunder stops only when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.

All law should protect property and punish plunder.

But, generally, the law is made by one class of men supported by a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.

The proper purpose of law is to use collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder.

Victims of Lawful Plunder

Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims.

When plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, plundered classes attempt by peaceful or revolutionary means to be heard.

Plundered classes propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

Men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal plunder.

A plundered class gaining political power, establishes a system of reprisals.

The Results of Legal Plunder

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.

The consequences of such a perversion?

Erases from conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree.

The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.

When law contradicts morality the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

These two evils are of equal consequence making it difficult to choose.

The Fate of Non-Conformists

If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of institutions you become a dangerous subversive shattering the foundation of society."

Existing law carries the supposition it is just merely because it is a law.

If there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned.

An effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.

Who Shall Judge?

The people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.

The Fatal Idea of Legal Plunder

Under the pretense of organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law takes property from one person and gives it to another.

If the law takes the wealth of all and gives it to a few every class will aspire to grasp the law.

Excluded classes will furiously demand their rights in "privileges and subsidies".

Perverted Law Causes Conflict

As long as law may be diverted from its true purpose then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.

Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing.

It is hardly necessary to examine what transpires in the French and English legislatures; merely to understand the issue is to know the answer.

Slavery and Tariffs Are Plunder

Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty.

The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.

The law has come to be an instrument of injustice.

The Law Defends Plunder

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it sparing the beneficiaries of the shame.

Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim " when he defends himself " as a criminal.

How to Identify Legal Plunder

If the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime it is committing plunder.

Try to change law and the person who profits will defend his acquired rights.

He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry.

Do not listen to the sophistry of vested interests.

Socialism Is Legal Plunder

The Choice Before Us

The Proper Function of the Law

Can the law "which necessarily requires the use of force" rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone?

I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it: Law is organized justice.

Justice organized by law excludes the idea of using law (force) to organize any human activity whatever, whether it be labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, art, or religion.

The organizing by law of any one of these would inevitably destroy the essential organization.

How can we imagine force being used against the liberty without it also being used against justice?

Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty

Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.

It is impossible for me to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary.

I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot

At this point, I think that I should explain exactly what I mean by the word plunder.

Plunder Violates Ownership

When wealth is transferred from the holder "without consent or compensation, by force or by fraud" "to one without title," ownership of property is violated; an act of plunder is committed.

This act is exactly what the law is supposed to suppress, always and everywhere.

In legal plunder the person receiving benefits is not responsible for the act of plundering.

The responsibility for this legal plunder rests with the law, the legislator, and society itself.

Three Systems of Plunder

Sincerity of the advocates of protectionism, socialism, and communism is not here questioned.

Any writer who would do that must be influenced by a political spirit or a political fear.

All that can be said is that legal plunder is more visible in communism because it is complete plunder; and in protectionism because the plunder is limited to specific groups and industries.

Socialism is the vaguest, most indecisive, and the most sincere stage of development.

Law Is Force

As law organizes justice should it not also organize labor, education, and religion?

Law cannot organize labor, education, and religion without destroying justice.

As law is force its proper functions cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force.

Law and force are just when they oblige him only to abstain from harming others.

They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They safeguard all of these.

Prevent Injustice - Law as a Negative Concept

The purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning.

Injustice, instead of justice, has an existence of its own.

Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign.

When the law is imposed upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed then the law is no longer prescriptive but rather conscriptive.

It substitutes the will and initiative of the legislator for the will and initiative of the people.

Men become MICE.

Try to imagine a regulation of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty.

The Political Approach

A politician identiying deprivations should ask himself whether this state of affairs is a consequence of old conquests and lootings or of more recent legal plunder and rethink the evil of legal plunder.

The Law and Charity

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.

The Law and Education

Law can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely without the use of force.

Or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge.

In this second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property.

The Law and Morals

To use force in matters of morality and religion is futile.

Socialists cleverly disguise legal plunder as fraternity, unity, organization, and association.

When we ask only for justice socialists brand us with the name individualist.

We assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced organization, not natural organization.

We repudiate the forms of association that are forced upon us; artificial unity, forced fraternity and any imposed association as it deprives people of individual responsibility.

We do not repudiate the natural unity of mankind under Providence.

A Confusion of Terms

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society.

If we disapprove of state education the socialists say that we are opposed to education.

If we object to a state religion the socialists say that we want no religion at all.

If we object to a state-enforced equality they say that we are against equality.

The Socialists Wish to Play God

Socialists look upon people as raw material to be formed into social combinations.

Socialists will demand that a small portion of mankind be set aside to experiment upon.

These intellectuals see the legislator as the potter molding the clay and see both the principle of action in the heart of man and the principle of discernment in the intellect of man as fatal gifts.

Following their own inclinations, they would arrive at atheism instead of religion, ignorance instead of knowledge, poverty instead of production and exchange.

The Socialists Despise Mankind

Mankind is drawn toward vice, the legislators attracted to virtue.

Open any random book on philosophy, politics, or history; you will find the idea mankind is merely inert matter, receiving life, organization, morality, prosperity from state power.

Conventional classical thought says that behind passive society there is a concealed power.

Paternal Government

The Idea of Passive Mankind

Classical theorists have held that everything came to the people from a source outside themselves.

Fenelon - archbishop, author, and instructor to the Duke of Burgundy - Utopia of Salentum suggests the Prince is depicted as the Soul of this shapeless mass of people who form the nation.

Whatever the issue may be, persons do not decide it for themselves; the Prince decides for them.

Socialists Ignore Reason and Facts

Socialists Want to Regiment People

A Famous Name and an Evil Idea

Now listen to the great Montesquieu on this same subject:

To maintain the spirit of commerce, it is necessary that all the laws must favor it.

Establish a census to reduce or fix differences in wealth within a certain limit.

Impose burdens upon wealth and grant relief to the poor.

In Sparta, ambition went without the hope of material reward.

Natural affection found no outlet because a man was neither son, husband, nor father.

Even chastity was no longer considered becoming.

Those who desire to establish similar institutions must do as follows:

Establish common ownership of property as in the republic of Plato;

revere the gods as Plato commanded;

prevent foreigners from mingling in order to preserve customs;

let the state, instead of the citizens, establish commerce.

Legislators should satisfy needs instead of desires.

The Leader of the Democrats

Rousseau suggests total inertness of mankind in the presence of legislators:

The legislator is the mechanic who invents the machine; replacing the Prince.

Why does Rousseau not see that men, obeying their own instincts, turn to farming on fertile soil, and commerce on an extensive easily accessible coast, without the interference of a Rousseau who might easily be mistaken.

In the attempt to create equality the state will be subjected to ceaseless agitations until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible nature regains her empire.

Socialists Want Forced Conformity

Rousseau invests the social engineers with a terrible responsibility:

Transform human nature;

Each individual, by himself, a solitary part of a greater whole;

The political creation of a people requires the ability to alter man's constitution.

Legislators Desire to Mold Mankind

Now let us examine Raynal on this subject of mankind being molded by the legislator:

It is especially in the distribution of property that the genius of the legislator will be found.

When a new colony is established, sufficient land should be given to each man.

When you resettle a nation with a past into a new country, the skill of the legislator rests in the policy of permitting the people to retain no injurious opinions and customs.

If you desire to prevent these opinions and customs from becoming permanent, you will secure the second generation by a general system of public education for the children.

Never establish a colony without first arranging to send wise men along ...

A Temporary Dictatorship

Here is Mably on this subject of the law and the legislator:

Think less of punishing faults, and more of rewarding that which you need.

If the evil has made such headway that ordinary governmental procedures are unable to cure it, then resort to an extraordinary tribunal with considerable powers for a short time.

The imagination of the citizens needs to be struck a hard blow.

Socialists Want Equality of Wealth

Next let us examine Condillac on this subject of the legislators and mankind:

Use punishment to cause sensual pleasures to become distasteful.

Every law passed will cause these savages to lose a vice and gain a virtue.

What you have learned about the republic of Sparta should enlighten you on this question.

The Error of the Socialist Writers

Antiquity presents everywhere the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud.

Therefore superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history.

Uncritical and childish conformists forget the dignity of artificial societies of the past.

What Is liberty?

The political struggle we witness is the instinctive struggle of all people toward liberty.

Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism including, of course, legal despotism?

Reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.

Philanthropic Tyranny

In a society struggling toward liberty famous men like Rousseau desire to force mankind docilely to bear the yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up: omnipotence of the Law.

Listen to the ideas of a few of the writers and politicians during that period:

SAINT-JUST: The legislator commands the future. It is for him to will the good of mankind. It is for him to make men what he wills them to be.

ROBESPIERRE: The function of government is to direct the physical and moral powers of the nation toward the end for which the commonwealth has come into being.

BILLAUD-VARENNES: A people who are to be returned to liberty must be formed anew.

LE PELLETIER: Considering the extent of human degradation, I am convinced that it is necessary to effect a total regeneration and create a new people.

The Socialists Want Dictatorship

Dictatorial Arrogance

Napoleon Wanted Passive Mankind

Like an alchemist, Napoleon considered all Europe to be material for his experiments.

But, in due course, this material reacted against him.

Mr. Louis Blanc understands the forcible imposition of the power of the law upon the people :

In our plan, the state has only to pass labor laws (nothing else?) by means of which industrial progress can and must proceed in complete liberty.

The state merely places society on an incline (that is all?).

Then society will slide down this incline by the force of natural established mechanism

The Vicious Circle of Socialism

We shall never escape the idea of passive mankind, and the power of the law being used by great men to propel the people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Once on this incline, will society enjoy liberty?

Liberty is not only a mere granted right; it is also the power granted to a person to use and to develop his faculties under a reign of justice and under the protection of the law.

To be truly free a person must have the power to use and develop his faculties.

Now by what action can society give to every person the necessary personal power?

The Doctrine of the Democrats

What is the attitude of the democrat when political rights are under discussion?

People with instinctive wisdom place unlimited faith in authority, which is little better than mud.

This strange phenomenon is the doctrine based on this triple hypothesis:
the total inertness of mankind, the omnipotence of the law, and the infallibility of the legislator.

Are the people always to be kept on leashes?

Are we not living in an age of enlightenment?

Have they not won their rights by great effort and sacrifice?

The Socialist Concept of Liberty

Competition is a system that ruins the businessmen and exterminates the people.

Free people are ruined and exterminated in proportion to their degree of freedom.

Mr. Louis Blanc also tells us that competition leads to monopoly. And by the same reasoning, he thus informs us that low prices lead to high prices; that competition drives production to destructive activity; that competition drains away the sources of purchasing power; that competition forces an increase in production while, at the same time, it forces a decrease in consumption.

Socialist Fear All Liberties

What liberty should the legislators permit people to have?

Liberty of conscience?

Liberty of education?

Due to legal despotism over education children are taught the noble ideas of the Romans.

Liberty of labor?

Liberty of trade?

Liberty of association?

According to socialist doctrine, true liberty and voluntary association are a contradiction .

Suppressing liberty of association forces people to associate together in true liberty.

Social democrats believe the nature of mankind tends toward every kind of degradation and disaster.

Legislators must make plans for the people in order to save them from themselves.

The Superman Idea

If the natural tendencies of mankind for survival are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of Saviors are always good?

Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race?

Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

Supermen Reject Free Choice

I do not dispute the right of social engineers to invent social combinations, to advertise them, to advocate them, and to try them upon themselves, at their own expense and risk.

They need only give up forcing us to acquiesce to their socialized projects, their free-credit banks, their Graeco-Roman concept of morality, and their commercial regulations.

The Cause of French Revolutions

Revolutions are constantly to be anticipated when the populace imagines their relationship to the state is the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.

The Enormous Power of Government

The state considers that its purpose is to enlighten, to develop, to enlarge, to strengthen, to spiritualize, and to sanctify the soul of the people - the responsibility of government is enormous.

In meddling with the balance of trade by playing with tariffs, the government thereby contracts to make trade prosper; and if this results in destruction instead of prosperity, whose fault is it?

Good fortune and bad fortune, wealth and destitution, equality and inequality, virtue and vice all then depend upon political administration.

Politics and Economics

Logically, at what point do the just powers of the legislator stop?

Law is the common force organized to act as an obstacle to injustice. In short, law is justice.

Proper Legislative Functions

It is not the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures.

The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person.

Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. Collective force may lawfully be used only for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose.

Law is the individual right of self-defense organized, which existed before law was formalized.

Law and Charity Are Not the Same

The mission of the law is to protect persons and property.

Justice must be measurable, immutable, and unchangeable.

If you attempt to make the law vague and uncertain, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, every individual and each faction will be striving to seize the law and impose it upon you.

The High Road to Communism

Mr. de Saint-Cricq demands the law control the consumers to benefit the producers.

Mr. Considerant suggests a guaranteed minimum of clothing, housing, food, and all other necessities.

As any arrangement still leaves room for inequality; the law should give to everyone - even in the most inaccessible hamlet - luxury, literature, and art.

Legislation then becomes "the battlefield for the fantasies and greed of everyone."

The Basis for Stable Government

I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice.

If the force of government were limited to suppressing injustice, then government would be as innocent of these sufferings as it is now innocent of changes in the temperature.

Justice Means Equal Rights

How can law force me to conform to the social plans of Mr. Mimerel or Mr. de Melun?

If the law has a moral right, then, force these gentlemen to submit to my plans?

Nature has not given me sufficient imagination to dream up a utopia also?

The Path to Dignity and Progress

It is only under just law that mankind will achieve liberty, safety, stability, and responsibility so that every person may attain his real worth and true dignity of being.

The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberation.

Proof of an Idea

The happiest people are found in the countries where the law least interferes with private affairs.

There the inventions of men are most nearly in harmony with the laws of God.

The Desire to Rule Over Others

Leaders of peoples, fathers of nations, are not quacks "armed with rings, hooks, and cords."

One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace-pipe unless I stretch his nostrils."

Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders."

A third said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs."

The last said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull."

"Stop," cried the traveler.

"What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty!"