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.
Interpretation
Law should protect individual rights, but misused, it undermines justice.
This quote by Frederic Bastiat emphasizes that the fundamental role of law is to safeguard the rights of individuals concerning their life, freedom, and possessions. However, when the law is employed for purposes beyond this, regardless of the intentions being noble, it can become distorted, leading to an erosion of justice. Bastiat warns that such perversion often arises from greed and misguided philanthropy, which ultimately harms the very foundation of justice and individual rights.
In practice
During a seminar on legal ethics, one might quote this to highlight the true purpose of law.
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.
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.
Each of us has a natural right, from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.
Power was my weakness and my temptation.
If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.
As we walked, I began to wonder what the opposite of molting was and why, unlike the body, which sheds everything, the soul cannot let go but compiles and accumulates, growing annual rings around the things it wants and dreams and remembers
We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
Man can and does rationalize his sins. He finds reasons for all his weakness, invents excuses that first calm and then deaden his conscience. He blames God, society, education, and environment for his wrong doing.
If I obey Jesus Christ, the redemption of God will flow through me to the lives of others, because behind the deed of obedience is the reality of Almighty God.
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