It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the futility of attempting to eliminate personal responsibility through legislation, as it only shifts the burden to others.
Frederic Bastiat emphasizes the inherent relationship between laws and personal responsibility, arguing that when individuals seek to pass laws that remove certain consequences of their actions, they are not truly resolving the issue. Instead, they merely transfer the repercussions onto others, resulting in greater injustice and a moral decline. The quote serves as a reminder of the importance of accountability and the moral implications of legislation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about legal reforms to emphasize the importance of personal accountability.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on.
No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.
The law is the collective organization of the individual's right to lawful defense of his life, liberty and property. When it is used for anything else, no matter how noble the cause, it becomes perverted and justice is weakened. Thus, the law has become perverted by stupid greed and false philanthropy.
If you wish to prosper, let your customer prosper.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
The glory of God is the human person fully alive.
The idea that time is an illusion is an old one, predating any Times Square ball drop or champagne celebrations. It reaches back to the days of Heraclitus and Parmenides, pre-Socratic thinkers who are staples of introductory philosophy courses.
Man is troubled not by events, but by the meaning he gives them.
We do not wish to enter Heaven until our work is done, for it would make us uneasy if there were one single soul left to be saved by our means.
Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.
America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.